Lift, Glorious Lift

I heard a jet this morning and when I finally found it in the skies I was filled with praise for the gift of lift.  Oh, the wonders I have been afforded because lift exists.  While examining our navels, who on earth would have conceived of curved wings lifting us to the heavens.  Oh God of wonder, God of wanders, how I have need to adore You.  Oh, one day me and mine will fly with lift from the unknown glories, of the forevermore, to places we cannot even daydream of but whose sights and sounds will be glorious to behold–to behold on wings filled with lift.  

  

 

A Long and Rewarding Goodbying Hello

Father, I am growing older, my body failing in so many ways.  I need Your daily help to live a vibrant and faith-filled life.  Help me, Father.  What am I to do when the pain of the fall begins to creep into my very joints, it's no longer an abstract Eden tale, but a creeping insidiousness that gets into every crevice, every nook and cranny of my body.  Age makes the fall personal, gives it every increasing awfulness, I have begun to taste it in my mouth, feel its beginning pangs of death, and know my mind's failings, forgetfulness, and bewilderment.  Daily life has become an exercise in accommodation, planning easier routes, avoiding unnecessary resistance, finding a better way.  But Father there is another side of this story between You and me.  Life in the grip of the fall makes our relationship all the more personal, as my need for help increases so does Yours as my helper; “Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”  The aches and pains of the fall draw me closer and closer to You, like old hands to a warm fire, Your care assures me of a coming doing away of all pain and sorrow; “there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”  And there is a grandeur of life, of living that only aging through the fall can mature me for.  It is an awareness of life, like an awareness of the air that envelops me now, its moisture and warmth I am now slowed enough to feel, the forest and mountains, river and sky all are part of Your ongoing care for me, abundant living life ripe with eternity even in the throes of death.  I feel eternity…I feel eternal, more eternal than ever before, a longing and restfulness in the wait, a long and rewarding goodbying hello; “then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

 

What To Do When You See Blue

In my readings and meditations, I am becoming aware of my need to experience God, to not only pray and read Scripture but also to develop the ability to experience my relationship with Him.  As I know Betty I know her best by experiencing life with her.  One way to experience Him is to acknowledge Him. The Bible teaches me to “acknowledge Him in all my ways and He will direct my path.”  This means as I go throughout my day to tell Him when I am experiencing Him, to smell a flower, see the blue of the sky, feel love in my heart, and acknowledge He is the creator of them and He also conceived of them; to thank and praise Him in a manner worthy of the experiences He is providing me.  The result of my acknowledging Him is He will “direct my paths”.  He will first direct my path to Him, to experience a deeper and more profound relationship with Him and in this, my love for Him, my need and desire for Him will grow.  

 

Cartoonican Is Not My Home.

The last two days of life in America are sorrowful.  The President bowing out, Vice President Harris being celebrated as his successor and President Clinton being the first to anoint her ascension is a circus.  We have all known for years President Biden had cognitive difficulties which made him unfit for office and yet it seems politicians and the media just discovered this.  No one in America voted for this, it is a plan developed in back rooms and rolled out to celebration in newsrooms and by politicians and elites across America.  It is a cartoon, a MAD Magazine edition on national politics and media and many Americans are now lapping it up like wine and bread at the Coliseum.  I love America, the original idea of America, and I am still proud to be American.  However me and mine stand apart and against this made up, wickedness, many are trying to make a stand in for America.  Rome is not my home nor my homeland.  I bear no allegiance to these people nor their destructive destroying agendas.  I am an American but what these people are making up is Cartoonican, Madland for the mad.

   

   

 

A Profound Price Paid!

There is a profound price to be paid for living in the wild.  I sit quietly in the woods.  A full moon is on; I have hidden in the forest's shadows.  I am lethal.  I have prepared myself to kill and asked God to give me success.  My gun lays across my lap, every move is first thought about. I can be stealth, a giftedness of being human.  In every way the killed is already dead, the act is all there is left.  The forest is alive with the sounds of living creatures unaware that death sits with them.  I see a dark image, the singular darker in the dark.  I watch its shape which tells me it is my quarry.  I continue to sit and wait and think the thing is now to be done, the taking of life, of me knowing and it not.  I carefully move raising my gun to aim.  I have it.  I briefly pause, I am to kill.  Boom.  The woods become silent.  For a second I am blinded and deaf from the blast.  The dark form is knocked several feet from where it stood only moments ago.  I rise and walk to stand over it.  It is wounded but still dying.  I take no pleasure in this.  Death has come to us both.  I return to our home.  I go to bed.  My lover soothes me with words of a job that had to be done and was done.  I take no pleasure in this. I lay quietly in bed paying the price.   

 

Saturday and Sunday or WEEKEND!!!

Saturday.  I had someone tell me retirement was great because every day was Saturday.  They were right.  The weekend was an ingenious conception and every week has one.  Thankfulness is never more than a weekend away.  But who to thank?  Why not God?  A brief consideration of the fit of earth and heaven to you and your well-being is a great nudge into Sunday.  Sunday is the weekend day He sat aside for us to tell Him “Thank You.”  Saying thank you helps you as much as it does Him.  

 

Oh But I Am Not Alone

A sweet lover is the most sincere gift outside of God himself, for allowing one to grow old with peace and joy.  I often watch mine nap during the day, her years relaxed and purely surfaced, a partner on my road to eternity.  I have lived with her over 40 years and her age is like height to a maple tree, giving me hope for greater and greater beauty as each fall rolls around.  She is this way, decanted wine, better and better she ages.  She is beautiful but it is her sweet kindness that creates in her an alluring which gives me joy in aging.  A sweet lover is the warmth of old age, a Godly kindness of balm for the aches of my heart and soul, like warm water to my aging body, soothing the journey behind the veil. 

      

I Am Now Alone

One of the great meanings of being old is we are often left alone.  The crowd at work, the people flowing in and out of our lives minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day have all gone away.  We find ourselves increasingly alone, our minutes, hours, and days filled with just our own company.  What follows is a deep and intimate examination of all things beginning with ourselves but in my case also the natural world and all its makings, rivers, clouds, sunshine, dirt, trees, and all that inhabit my new world.  It is a coming to grasp the vapor of life, its brevity and quick decaying of your body but also the ancientness of the stars, the mountains, the waters.  Alone, standing alone, you must accept the ultimate reality of times passing and the infinitesimally small role you played in it.  You are also aware of the great power of your life to force change in the world and the ultimate loss of that power as you sit quietly alone, old, mostly spent out, used up, exhausted.  It is not a sadness but an awareness of life's great presence for being and a gradual knowing of the profound nature of faith, religious faith, that alone matters in the waning years of your life.  Faith alone can give meaning to your life, can cradle you when your body is rapidly moving back to the cradle of the earth.  Faith alone allows me to transcend the great aloneness of aging, to cast upon my heart meaning, the ecstasy of being alive, of the enormity of knowing what only comes when you sit aged alone, the meaning of your past, the realness of your present, and the great adventures of life to come.  Oh the joy of knowing self old, to have The Spirit prompting your imaginings, to have stored up enough years to think wisely of eternity.  Here at Fair Haven, I have a strong Counselor who speaks to me thus, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him…”.

         

 

Dull Styrofoam and Wonderful Yokes

I am in a hotel room far from home.  My lover sleeps restlessly signally she will soon awake.  I am drinking my coffee from a styrofoam hotel room cup.  It continually reminds me of the poverty of modernity.  We have become a throw-away society surrounding ourselves with daily rituals and utensils that have no personal tie to our lives.  I have a beautiful, handmade ceramic coffee cup in my car two floors down and outside.  I carry one whenever we travel but forgot to bring it up last night.  It is a small but powerful way to enhance the act of being alive, to allow beauty, even small beauty, to fill all moments and rituals of my day.  It is small but so is blue and the wild violet along the trail.  All beauty is divine, it is God reminding us HE IS, and He is for us.  Surrounding oneself with it is our acknowledging Him, it is working out of our daily salvation, and in it, we are in relationship with Him.  This is life easy, and abundant, the yoke we are meant to wear…a yoke legend says Christ Jesus made the best ones in all Galilee during his days learning the craft of beautiful woodwork.

 

The Most Ambitious Women I Ever Met.

I don't mind admitting I fell in love with Betty the first time I saw her.  She was the dean of students at TSD and I saw her out the office window of the high school boys' dorm where I worked.  I never dreamed we would date but a year later, she agreed to go hiking with me.  Thus began my knowing her as someone just as wild as me without the loss of innocence.  She was willing to go with me on all the adventures I dreamed of, from repelling, traveling, and hiking, to art-making and having family.  She saw me through to salvation.  We have danced in abandoned ballrooms in the Peabody, hiked to the tree line of the Grand Tetons, camped a month above the Artic Circle, drug our children all over the Western world, and traveled trails and one-lane roads lost in jungles of Costa Rica and the Alps of Italy.  Her elegance never leaves her, from leaping into ice-cold mountain streams to sitting with college presidents for lunch, she has always startled me with her beauty, her happy kindness, and her all in all the time spirit.  She has been the salvation God has often loaned me to save me from death, sorrow, and despair.  Her wildness is her, not a part of her, she is wild, wildly elegant, wildly truthful.   She knows not herself this way as a butterfly knows not its beauty…they just are.  She is the serenity of innocence, a substance of kindness, and gives herself to me to share in all of her, all the wonders of her unknown ambitions.  

My lover skiing two days ago at 71.

 

Free of Longings

The longings of my heart are an integral and mysterious part of my life.  Evolution isn’t profound enough to impart survival of this most divine part of me.  Longings far exceed the necessities of life, they are the ecstacies of wanting more, much more of life.  Old age clearly defines the fall, I, so young and alive, such a marvel of humanity, now broken, old, and failing in many ways.  I long for young, for the body I once inhabited, a mind I once loved with, for the heart that pushed me up mountains and sought to seek the ever-unknown, my soul that sought salvation.  I was a marvelous human body…how could that marvel become only a longing for lost marvel?  When Christ said he came to seek and to save the lost, He meant all I have lost.  My longings are the lost me who He will someday make whole, eternally whole, and then longings will be gone as certainly as my once youngness has disappeared, and I will be replaced with the new and always new, me…free of longings! 

We all three suffer under the fall.

   

 

Celebrating The Rainmaker in the Rain Gauge

How often do you celebrate?  Exuberantly celebrate?  I don’t mean whopping, hollering, and jumping up and down.  I mean an overwhelming sense of joy in someone or something?  Celebration is a gift God gives us to acknowledge Him.  Yesterday it rained 1½”.  It hadn’t rained at Fair Haven for over a month.  We were overwhelmed with joy for such a kind and abundant gift.  My daughter and granddaughter saved a turtle yesterday who had wandered out on the road.  Inchworms, DQ Blizzards, and the blue in the sky are all worthy of celebration when you think of the concepts of it all.  Think of thinking up an inchworm, taste buds, grass, cows, milk, ice cream, making blue, and then coloring the sky with it every day.  Our culture celebrates explaining everything away until everything is common except the perverse and now we have dulled ourselves into celebrating it.  The next time you smell fried okra you should stop and think, who thought up my nose, okra, frying and tasting?  And learn once again the primal joy of celebrating Someone who has given you a living life worth celebrating. 

   

 

The Oath

We have lost the great ongoing joy of family, one blood flowing through all the group, the tieing binds, the unbroken circle.  One reason is we have lost something that mixes with the blood, ties the bind, and completes the circle.  We have lost the personal, all-knowing, all-present God and His Son Christ Jesus.  Oh, we add them on here and there, crisis additions, a thought here, a nod there, close enough not to bother with and far enough away not to require anything of us.  We have no allegiance, sworn camaraderie come life or death which makes of and for us a family fortress come what may.  And so we are left with a village of unguarded dwellings, families with no outer perimeter, no Godly circle which guards us, gives us worshipful purpose, creeds we never break, promises we rely on, an all-for-one and one for all that never fails.  Here's to oaths of allegiance, public family promises that for me and mine, we will serve the Lord.  We hereby this day swear again, we are with God, with His Son Christ Jesus and here we all stand.  I give my oath.      

We each took this oath this week.

 

Reunioned

We have gathered as a clan, the Bensons.  We reunion yearly, all our lives, hearts, and souls brought together to tie tighter, the Tie that binds.  We are deep in Appalachia, and we will bathe in her cold streams today. It will truly be baptism in Your mountains waters, reigning here since Eden.  We gather in the hills that birthed us, the mountains we were born in, those giants we knew first as home, our earliest memories made among them.  The Bible tells many tales of going up to the mountains, Abraham with Issac, Moses to meet God, and Christ to pray.  So we go up to the mountains to reunite, to resettle our hearts, to recommit to each other, to remind each other where we stand, with each other, and Who we stand with, God our Father.  We have gathered as a clan, the Bensons, 21 souls bond to each other, to the mountained earth, to the hope we hope in, The Ancient of Days, our Eternal Hope.