Meeting Again A Mighty Man

I am going to the great parting today, one of my mighty men has passed on to his Father.  There are very few great men in one’s life, those men who you meet and who change the direction of your life.  In fact, he changed the direction of all of my family's lives.  He is the artist who modeled what it meant to be an artist.  42 years ago, he was my art professor, but over my nine years in Art School, he became a man I wanted to be just like.  It wasn’t that I wanted to model my life after him.  I wanted to be just like him.  He was the type of man, artist, Christian, man of God, I wanted to be just like.  I have seven mighty men in my life of 68 years.  He is number three.  A mighty man has parted from earth, and all of earth is poorer, but I am richer.  We were to meet a few months ago, and he had to cancel the day we were to meet.  He texted me and closed with this, “I love you too, Aaron and Betty, and all the kids.  Have a wonderful life. We will meet again.”  Yes, Dr. Darrow.  We will meet again. A mighty man has parted this earth. 

The last time I saw him.

   

These are how I came to know him.

Bearing Your Name and Your Blood

5-18-2025

Number 13 has arrived, making us the luckiest family on earth.  Elijah John Benson is ours, our 13th grandchild.  He is tiny, beautiful, and laid back, squawks only when hungry.  He is a peace-filled balm to this aging old soul.  He is so new, so fresh, a life just begun.  Only the aged can see the depth of joy and satisfaction in the exquisite presence of a newborn human being bearing your name and your blood.  

Pushing Our Limits

It is a rainy Sunday morning coming down.  We are in a distant state, caring for a family in need.  We are pushing our limits, using up physical resources, bending our backs to the plow, setting our feet to the needs, hands to the task.  We have become old, not in essence but in the present.  Our hearts and souls don’t feel we are, but our bodies do.  We are young and filled with great hopes and desires, encased in bodies worn and weathered.  Our hearts are so free, so silly in our joinings to each other, memories of adventures, all day and nighters, on the edge, racing for the brass ring.  We have beheld Him, lived in His presence, seen His glories, and now, aged and bent, our meaning is a great aching in our hearts of knowing who we were is still who we are.  My lover and I.  We are again...pushing our limits.    

 

The Wonders of Your Love

What are the wonders of your love?  If you asked your spouse, children, or friends, what would they say?  This morning I read in the Psalms, David asking God to show him, “the wonders of your (God) great love.  We are all recipients of God’s great love wonders.  Love, light, warmth, beauty, and hopefully, salvation.  After I read this, I spent some time thanking God, and now, as I meditate on it, I wonder how I am doing sharing the wonders of His great love?  I am a great recipient.  I hope I am a great giver.     

Stiff-Necked and Hard-Hearted

*Two nights ago, a terrible storm swept through our area. As usual, I found myself worrying and praying, specifically for the trees in our front yard at Fair Haven. I asked God to protect them. While the storm raged, I watched the news, and the newscasters were dramatic in their descriptions of its intensity. It sounded like devastation was inevitable.

The next morning, as we left downtown Knoxville and drove toward Fair Haven, I braced myself. I fully expected to see trees down all along the way. But as I drove down the interstate—lined with trees as far as the eye could see—I noticed something strange. Not one was down. I thought to myself, “That’s odd. I was sure I’d see storm damage by now.”

And in that quiet moment, God spoke to my heart:

 "Lee, your glass isn’t just half full—it’s running over and spilling into your lap. Look at all the trees I protected. But you’re focused on the one you expected to fall."

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud and share it with Betty.

By the end of the day, I realized—I hadn’t seen a single tree down. Not one.

This morning, while reading the Bible, I was reminded how often God called His people “stiff-necked” and “hard-hearted.” And I had to admit… I can often be a stiff-necked, hard-hearted Christian.

I’m sorry, Lord.

*Checked with Grammarly and ChatGPT 

Mother's Day Code: Faulty Sensor

I have a camshaft sensor fault in my truck.  It makes all the other things run in order.  Now it runs really rough when it idles.  My mom is in a state of idle.  She can sit in a wheelchair.  But her life sensor has become faulty.  She doesn’t run right. There is very little of my mom left, nothing really that I knew all my life as her.  I think she knows me, sometimes, and sometimes knows my name.  I can see it in her eyes when all things are clicking correctly, twinkling clarity I call it, a momentary glimpse that all is there.  But it's gone as quick as it comes.  She is 100% my mom, but only a little percentage of herself.  How do I have her in my life?  The way she is!!!  I don’t know if she experiences happiness.  She had very little of it growing up, and so she struggled to be able to experience it when she was my mom.  It wasn’t that she wasn’t content or fulfilled in her day-to-day, but her years to 16 were surely scarred by unhappiness and regret.  Her greatest trait was that she worked all the time, kept us spotless, her home the same, and her life as well.  She was a good Baptist but a greater Christian.  I like to think I was her favorite; she would tell me, “You were the one I prayed for, and God gave me you.”  Years later, telling me her memory of my teenage years, she would say, “Lee, often was the nights I would walk the back yard praying for the Lord to take you home or me one.”  Eventually, He will take us both home to be with him.   My mom has a life sensor fault.  She is my mom.      

 

Last Thoughts on Spain

At the airport in Madrid, the day we were leaving, I noticed a young man lying on the floor squeezed in behind a pillar facing the wall. He was dirty, disheveled, and asleep, with a small, tattered bag for a pillow.  It dawned on me I had seen the same boy in the same state but in a different part of the airport when we had arrived two weeks earlier.  He must live at the airport.  At that moment, it struck me that in all my reality of validation of my worth in Christ’s love, it was no more or less than the validation of worth this young man had in Christ’s love for him.  We were equal in the sight of our Lord.  I had an overwhelming sense of knowing, of wonder, of the reality of life as I quickly passed him in my other reality of trying to navigate all the systems of a foreign airport to allow me to go from there to my plane and ultimately to America.  It was the moment of juxtaposing my two realities, one harried and rushed, one stark, clear, and the truer of the two.  I write this because our trip, my lover and I, was a grand reality of our relationship with God, with beauty, in an overwhelming variety of experiences.  But at that moment in the airport, I realized the reality of this young man and me over the preceding two weeks was the same, two children being kept by God who would someday stand before Him to give an account.   It was a spark of meaning like the flash of lightning.  I said a brief prayer for him and rushed on in my other reality. 

Landed in Knoxville, hard rode, and put up wet but
good to be home.

   

From the Taj Mahal

When I was a little boy, my mom always read to me.  One of the books she read  was titled “The Man Without a Country.”  It was about an army officer who was tried for treason during the Revolutionary War.  During the trial, he said he wished he would never hear of America again.  He was convicted, and the judge sentenced him to serve out his life sentence onboard ships and never again be allowed in America or to hear or read a word about America.  I never got over that story.  This morning, I woke up in the Taj Mahal, the penthouse suite in a high-rise in Knoxville, the whole top floor.  It is owned by a dear friend of our whole family.  They have loaned it to us while our home is being built.  Our contractor still needs a few days to get the basement finished, so we can at least move back into my studio while the remainder of our home is finished.  So we are a couple without a home.  We long to be a Fair Haven, but–the Taj Mahal is a grand substitute.  

My view this morning in America.

 

Elton's song "Daniel" in reverse, Leaving Spain

Going home morning.  I am awake early, make cowboy coffee, read the Ancient Text,  and write my prayers.  My lover sleeps.  I love sitting with her this way, she always sleeps the rest of the innocent.  It is who she is.  We fly home today at 1:45p.m., eight hours to Philadelphia, a three-hour layover, and get to Knoxville at 8:55 this evening.  Coming home from abroad is an ordeal; it will be a 16-hour day.  But it is a part of a grace-filled life.  One cannot expect to travel halfway around the world and arrive feeling like you had just strolled through the tulips.  Travel is one of the deepest desires in humans, to explore, to search out, and reach beyond our vision to other worlds.  It is Godly and from God.  Why else would the earth be so beautiful if He didn’t intend us to go see it and, in the seeing, give Him praise?  My lover awakens and kisses the top of my head.  From far away.  lee

Leaving Spain.

 

Marked by Faith, Hope, and Love

Fifteen days since we left, and now I sit in a hotel room at Madrid’s airport, weary after a day of travel, waiting to fly home tomorrow.  It has been a crusade; we have dwelt in many houses of our Lord.  We have traveled some 5000 plus kilometers and seen the width and depth of Spain and Portugal.  It is a garden of earthly delights; the whole is a bloom of wheat, crops, and orchards of every kind, rolling across every square inch of her.  Only her many mountains interrupt the abundance.  And there is one constant, thousands of homestead relics, dilapidated sentinels of a past filled with people of the land, stone Ebenezers declaring a rich history of farming peoples who took God at his Word and took dominative care of this land.  I often see abandoned homes and think about how ambitious the old souls were who had built them, now gone the way of all things, dust to dust.  We all leave some mark on the earth, and these have left a mark of hopeful planting, tilling, and bringing forth from the land.  Faith, hope, and love, this is way we leave Spain.  It has marked us!  From the Axor Hotel, Madrid Airport.  lee

 

The Adventure of Returning

We turn for home today, a ritual we have done over and over again from points all over the earth.  We turn north for Madrid, a two-day journey, and then fly away home on the third day.  It is a great blessing to go home, to have a home, a loved family, to know this is our bit of land, our piece of the earth the Lord has loaned us to grow old on.  My dad was a rolling stone, my mom always saying, “He can’t stay put for long”, and I am a lot like him, always wondering what's around that bend in the trail, over the next rise, at the top of the mountain.  But even so, going home is a great joy; to turn one’s face homeward is to know another adventure, the adventure of returning.  From southern Portugal.  lee

Our beloved Fair Haven from our new porch.  Taken the day
before we left.

 

Don't Hurt God

We do nothing well.  Lounge around, read, piddle, it's called.  Everyone needs piddle time.  Time with nothing on the schedule, no engagements, no deadlines, checkout times, checkin times, nothing but deciding if we’ll get up, continue to write, have another cup of coffee, or just sit and stare out the window.  One of our great piddle pastimes is looking, seeing, and acknowledging.  There is so much beauty in the world, a cornucopia of sensory delights, and most are naturally occurring.  Well, naturally, meaning God made them.  I mean “who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it wth dew…”  The Lord God can.  But it is the “acknowledging” that we can often skip over.  If you could take a sunrise and sprinkle it with dew and no one acknowledged you for it, that would hurt.  Don’t hurt God.  That’s not nice.  The Candy Man can!!!    

 

 

Do Nothing Days

We have come off the road.  After 10 days and a few thousand kilometers, we have nooked in on the southern coast of Portugal, Carvoeiro, just a few meters from the rocky shore.  They say these are the most beautiful beaches in Europe, and we have three days of rest, do nothing days, to see, enjoy, eat simply, live slowly, and stroll the trails connecting all the beaches.  We are lovers needing loving, and God often uses beauty and nature to love us.  He is good at it, loving, beauty, and making nature are some of His specialties.  Love us, God.  We are here.  From Porches, Portugal.  lee    

Doing nothing in front of our small cottage in Portugal.

 

Traveling Tramps

My lover and I are traveling tramps.  By this, I mean we are able to just roll along, come what may.  We are continually lost, most every day, sometimes multiple times a day, in various cities.  We run low on gas in the aloneness of mountain passes.  We run out of food and survive feasting on a few raisins, a roll from the plane my lover had saved in her purse, a bit of trail mix, and an apple.  We make do, living on my lover's smile and happy hearts.  But we are with God, and He with us.  We ask Him for help and we acknowledge all His goodness.  

The reality of our travels is we live a charmed life, find ourselves in the most amazing places, seeing the most amazing things, being alone, together with God and all His creatures.  “All creatures great and small, the Lord God made them all.”*  From the ocean side in Portugal.  lee  

*"All Things Bright and Beautiful" by Cecil Frances Alexander