My Old Crush

I have known two moms in my life.  When I was little, I use to think my mom was the most beautiful woman on earth.  She would always be in a dress, flowered print with a thin matching belt.  She was my sweetheart, my first crush.  She would often tell me she had prayed to have me.   I was taken by her love for me and that it came in such a beautiful woman.  At 14 I veered off onto the highway to hades, on the road mostly.  I eventually got married, saved at 28, had four children, raised them on Jesus and the road, became an artist, worked, bought homes and land, and lived on the road.  I would see mom a few times every year.  She was someone who owned a home where I could always crash, rest and my family be well fed.  The children grew up, moved away, got married, had our grandchildren, and began their own life on the road.  I returned to knowing mom for the second time.  I hadn’t known her dearly for 50 years.  I do now.  She is just a shell of my original mom.  Death has a stone-cold grip on her physical body and is wringing hard the life out of her.  I sit with her quietly, she sleeping off and on, her body mocking my early memories of her.  She was the most beautiful woman I knew, and she loved me.  My mom is mostly a living body now, limited beyond imagination, a sliver of who she was so recently ago.  She is the two moms I know best, the one when I was just a child and now the one who is just a wisp, a tiny fragment of my old: crush.   

Mom and me.

           

My Anti-inflammatory God

I hurt from head to toe.  It takes me a while to get my body to get all its 65-year-old parts working.  I just asked God if he would be my Anti-inflammatory and began to write to him my complaining request.  Almost immediately I was reminded of all the Positive-Flame (atory) I have. My eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and feeling and He making all kinds of beauty I can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.  I can see His Word this morning, hear my lover sleeping, smell Fair Haven, our home, and all her aromas reminding me I am sheltered.  I can taste the coffee in my beautiful handmade cup, and I can begin to feel my heart becoming a flame of warming light of his grace.  My heart and soul are fully functioning, I can wander in memories, wonder at dawn, my lover in love with me, our love making 19 more Bensons.  I have wood that makes fire, Krispy Kreme 30 miles away, and Living Water I can even now feel flowing through me.  This is grace.  My 65-year-old body is able to be conscious of its glorified state.  Thank you my “Flammantory” God.    

 

Getting Dirty in a White Tuxedo

I had a brief encounter with the news yesterday.  I am often shocked at how quickly I get stained.  Someone once told me, Lee “you know how not to get dirty?  Always wear a white tuxedo.”  I gloried in the sincere wisdom of that statement.  In 2008 I made a conscious decision to stop watching the news.  I often felt dirtied by it, felt like I had been shown things I was not capable of bearing up under, and many times felt like I had been taken to a XXX movie of life.  It was like I was self-harming my heart, mind, and soul.  No one can live in the drowning pool of technology today without occasionally getting a little filth splashed on you, tuxedo or not.  What bears down on me today is how civil so much wickedness has become, as if speaking of Auschwitz was talking innocently about Disney World.   

     

“Didn’t I tell you!!!”

Remember how many times you told someone how wonderful something was going to be because you had done it and they hadn’t?  Then they experienced it and they were overcome with the joy of it and you got to say, “Didn’t I tell you…”.  The great “didn’t I tell you!” joy.  Few joys are like that.  I have that experience all the time.  The reason is all the great experiences I have been gracefully given.  And when we’ve had a great experience what we want more than anything is to share it with others.  (There is a sermon in there).  Such is the woodfire kiln.  It is perhaps the greatest liturgical act available to those at Union.  It is like seeing Chartres Cathedral or the Grand Canyon or sweetly kissing your hurting lover’s wound.  When she is in mid-fire and the door is open and the fire is lazily meandering in a 22’ horizontal swirl or when she gets to 2400+° and the door is opened, and it knocks you back and the roaring light leaps out and engulfs you in brilliance…and God is so real…and He whispers “wait until I unwrap you completely and you behold the heavens.” And then we will hear the ultimate, “Didn’t I tell you!”

P.S.  For those who have eyes and ears to hear, come by the wood kiln tonight and meet God.

The Liturgy has begun. 

The Good Shepherd Longing Song

Good morning, Father, Christ my Savior, and my Dear Holy Spirit who gives me the “mind of Christ”. It is You, Christ, and you alone who saves me, not my faith.  I cannot cling to my faith but to you, for even my faith will fail me often and I am left shivering and undone.  But in all things, sorrows, deep pits, long aways, there is you with me, there is You, Father, holding me and mine in your hands of which nothing, not even my unbelief can snatch me away.  Oh, Jesus, it is you and you alone who securely keep me when all else assails me, even my own doubts, you, and you alone save me.  Often even, it is your Word that saves me from my unbelief, from my fears, and my constant waywardness until I feel lost again…then it is Your Word, “living and active” which is your voice again reassuring me that my security is your concern, your responsibility, your duty and you, above all else, are faithful.  I know your voice, the voice of the Good Shepherd, and that voice is often your spoken Word, “sharper” than even my doubts, sharper than a “two-edged" sorrow, "piercing my soul, spirit”, even the marrow of my doubting body, saying, always saying, I am Yours and nothing, nothing, not anything in heaven above or earth below, can take me away from you and your love which will eventually carry me to heaven to be with you and mine already there. 

Rising Stones sculpture site.

   

Bring in the Clowns

The balloon incident.  It is the latest instance of how critical our Presidency is.  The media has long since evolved into an impotent, uninformed, untruthful, cheerleader of every idiocy of social, economic, security, and sexual deviancy that can be imagined.  How ignorant can a whole segment of those representing one of our most basic freedoms, freedom of the press, be?  They continue to rapidly lower the bar.  There is now little honor among the press.   

And so the balloon(s) become one more ironic balloon to bat around in the game of “keep afloat”.  Keep floating lies, deceptions, and the pageantry of fools while America fades, slowly tripping off stage.  Countries are macrocosms of families.  We all know how difficult family management is, the enormity of the task, and the need for great wisdom.  Relate that to America and the need for wise, shrewd, intelligent leadership and you can see how the balloon(s) were allowed to float away.  Bring in the clowns.  The balloons are drifting away.    

 

Here Comes the Son

Light is one of the greatest gifts and one so needed.  For thousands of years, fire was the only answer.  Such kindness, light, warmth, safety, utilitarian, and in the end it became an enduring comforter, a role it still enjoys.  The quest for more efficient light was solved 144 years ago with the invention of the light bulb.  But there was and remains one light, the light for living, which remains our greatest need.  We continue to refine light for our physical space but light for living well, living in peace with our neighbor, living kindly with the earth, living worthily, and living successfully in the complexities of life remains often dark.  Who will save us from this darkness?  Who will provide us with this light for life, light for living?