A Whispered Blessing

Stop!  Can you hear it?  The earth is beginning to groan under the scorching heat of long summer.  It is dropping a few yellowed leaves of burden, turning brown at the edges, a droop here, a fading flower there, and a whisper, “Please, Good God, a little rest!”  Can you hear her?  She is slowing, stilling before her Lord, “I have served You well; I multiplied Your treasure, greened and brightened every corner of Your earth; I have been faithful; again!”  

And this is the whisper to lean in and hear: “Well done, My good and faithful servant.”

A good and faithful leaf.

 

Stardust

I sit in my hot tub in the dark of night looking at the stars as they move across the same heavens Adam gazed at.  I follow the many satellites, wonder what they are doing in the planes that move silently over me, and listen to Willie’s Stardust album, waiting on September Song to play.  It is the life theme of my time left on earth.  I am in the fall of life, and fall is my time of year.  I reflect and plan what has been put by and what I need to plant.  I think of coming warm fires, a new year, and what a 68-year-old body is capable of doing and what it might need; to do it. My body is a marvel of engineering Holiness, made special just for me to be just the me I was made to be at 68.  It now reminds me quietly, and viciously, that life, all life, is a gift made to wonder “In my heart there always will remain, My stardust melody, The memory of love’s refrain.”   

A Reunion, "On A Slow Train Bound for Nowhere"

I graduated from high school 50 years ago this year.  It was 1976, our country's bicentennial.  It made us feel special, unique, as only an 18-year-old can feel, like the world was made for us.  I came to high school as I did for almost all grades, from another town, in the middle of my freshman year, my dad taking another church.  I felt like an outsider, didn’t belong, and didn't want to.  I was good at sports, which had always served me well, like a cloak that made me someone when I was no one.  It was a time of greats, great angst, great loves, great meaning, great losses, when your total memory was 18 years, and all experiences were exquisitely profound, and you would die for a small band of brothers and sisters.  It was 3 1⁄2 years, a little less than a quarter of my life then, but now at 68, it makes up half the memories I remember.  I left that town “and took off for the sky” and never came back except when I think about “The Way We Were.”  Oh, to find myself “on a warm summer’s evening on a train bound for nowhere” with a few of those who make up many of the memories of my heart.