My weather App says it feels like 1° outside. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt one degree so I went outside in the dark in my pajamas to experience it. It is bitter! Didn’t want to experience it too long. Came back in and it struck me that it’s Valentine’s Day which means my lover and I will warm each other with our 98.6° hearts. God is good. God is great. Let us thank Him.
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| What 98.6° looks like. |
2-6-2021
We got the word yesterday that my Mamaw’s last surviving sibling had died. He was 94. They were a big family, my Mamaw the oldest and only girl, with 8 brothers. They were salt Americans, hard workers, quiet, kept to their business and out of others. Several went north during hard times to find work and never came back. He was one of them. They are all gone now. All the members of our family that belonged to that greatest generation have now passed into history. It is a strong, and prosperous history, perhaps America’s greatest; only time and the rest of us left will tell. There is a wife of one brother still living but of that one family, that great family, they are all gone. But I guess they will never be gone really, because they were those that helped build a country, to put us on the world stage, saved us all from tyranny, built the factories, roads, and bridges, ironed it out, smoothed the way, and left it far better than they found it; our America was built by The(se) American’s The Beautiful.
I was lost yesterday. I have never missed a Super Bowl and spend the whole day watching the pre-game but yesterday I seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole. I am from the generation of the NFL and AFL, Joe Namath, Ali, Hey Jude, and House of the Rising Sun. Billy Graham, Abraham, Martin and John, and American Women carried our torches. It was peace, love, and understanding, no war, and blacks in my dad’s Southern Baptist Church. It was The Way We Were. I finally started to understand when the game started. I know football. And then Bruce Springsteen did the best thing of the entire 7- or 8-hour program, the Re-United States of America and I felt like I was back on my home turf.
Betty and I worked all day yesterday making a trail up our mountain. We’ve been working on it for a while and have a couple hundred feet complete but it’s just a start; haven’t even begun to go up, still meandering around the shoreline. I love working on it. It is hopeful labor, hard work that makes it all the more hope-filled. As we quietly work in the woods I often stop and sit on a log or a hump on the shore and look out on the earth. God must take great pleasure in his creation, earth, but I am certain there is a certain amount of nostalgia, His longing for the re-creation, the new earth. I know the trail we are making is for us and after us may return to the wild, the briars and thorns evilly at work again entangling earth into their dying desires. But not for now. Betty and I are sons and daughters of King Gardner and as he will make all things new one day, we are laboring at subduing today. We are deeply drawn to remake the garden, it’s been in us since we were banished from it, the labor, the sweat to regain that which we lost. It is God’s gift to us, the nostalgia for a true Fair Haven or Eden as it were; a longing to make a trail to the East Gate where the flaming sword will be no more, and finally, ever finally we are welcomed Home.
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| Resting on a hump of the shore. |
Yesterday morning I was talking to my daughter on the phone and she exclaimed, “Oh dad you should see the sky. It’s so beautiful.” “Take a picture and send it to me,” I said. She did and then said, “Oh it is nothing like the real thing; I sure am glad I’m not in charge of eyes.” I laughed and said I understood. I take pictures all the time and it never looks anything as good as what I see. I told her I was going to write down what she said and share it with my class. She laughed and said, “Dad it is just because I’ve heard you say it so often, like “boy I sure am glad I’m not in charge of rain!”” I laughed and thinking of our newest, hottest gadget, the iPhone 12, I said, “yes, if we were in charge of eyes we would have a third one in our cheek.” God is good. God is great. Let us thank him…” as we chuckle.
I never tire of the wisdom of creation. Yesterday as I walked down our hall I glanced at the plant in our foyer. It’s a love plant that Betty’s mom gave her. It has been in our foyer for years, been cut back to a nub several times but keeps growing. What startled me yesterday is how it had so aligned itself with the sunlight that came through the window it sets in front of. The window is tall and thin, a frame for our front door, and the plant has grown perfectly aligned with it so that its whole body enjoys the light available to it. There is a sermon there, a glorious sermon of kindness and wise obedience. Preach on plant.
I am 63 today. I know nothing of the day I was born 63 years ago. I may already be 63 or it may be some other specific time today but I am 63 today. I can remember when my youthful arrogance would have thought 63 years old was finished, what good could you possibly be at 63? The real good is, at 63, I am so much more aware of the good. My star is burning, my lover sleeps safely, we have loved our way to a kingdom of 19 Benson’s, our home is warm, and God through Christ is my Father. He is responsible for this ongoing and ever-increasing awareness of the beautiful meaning of being. His awakening of me through salvation is as dramatic as He proclaimed it to be, “You must be born again.” Nothing had prepared me for the meaning that would accompany that; an intensity of knowing of meaning of purposeful being.
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| My virtual party. |
