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.

 

I Am The Wildest Thing in the Wild

I have the enormous pleasure of waking every day in the wilderness, completely absorbed into the daily life of the wild.  I sit on our front porch, seeing and hearing how wild begins its day.  Nothing interferes with it, my presence unnoticed.  I am wild.  The weather drifts by from the SW, a cloud or two, then clear again.  Water birds begin to appear, an osprey lands on a tree next to me and eats his freshly caught fish.  A few blooms have fallen from our flowers and many new ones have appeared.  Blue Jays and Blue Birds begin their battles, and wild unknown sounds fill the woods.  Across the river, the sun lights the mountain tops.  My lover appears, sleepy-eyed and just awake.  We touch each other, intimately, as wild things do.  Increasingly we are becoming wild, fitting into where we are.  Aging is a wilderness of the living, an ongoing discovery of adaptation to your environment.  A cold swim, a nodding off under a shade tree, a slow walk up the hill, a watching night become day.  Ancient tasks for ancient people, the knowing life, on the edge before the coming crossing over.  I have the enormous pleasure of waking in the wilderness and being the wildest thing in the wild.    

 

Boy Do We Need the Rain Maker

Boy, do we need rain.  Betty and I had a long road trip yesterday and the corn and bean fields lie in dire need.  This is why I love God.  One time I pondered rain.  Thought deeply on the truth I could not nor would ever make one drop of rain.  If I were responsible for watering the earth I would have hoses and sprinklers everywhere and half of them would be squirting water in the lake.  At some point, everyone has to decide who makes rain and worship accordingly.  I can ask the cosmos to evolve itself into some badly needed rain or I can ask the One who conceived it, made it, and, in one of the greatest acts of kindness, shares it.  Now there's a reason to love Him.    

Rays of God's assurance, He makes rain and
has figured out how to share it.

 

 

Father's Day a Few Days Later

I have had the great blessing of knowing great men in my life.  As I grow older it becomes apparent I am always in need of great men.  Sadly my most trusted men have passed on.  My father-in-law, Robert (Bob) Claggett Brown Jr. was a great man to me.  He fought in WW II, Pacific Theater, battled scared, ending up in Hiroshima.  Our relationship grew and over time developed into a close bond.  He was stoic and could be severe, but he became a great encourager, teacher, and mentor to me.  Eventually, I became for him, someone who would sit and listen. Over the years he opened up about his early life, his war experience, and the things that made him who he was.   His early life was spent with his father wrestling out a living sharecropping in upper west Tennessee. His war experiences were shared slowly, a bit here and there.  They were proud memories, often violent and deadly, heroic by any measure.  In the last years of his life, we visited almost every Sunday where I would sit in the living room next to him and listen to him talk.  Toward the end, we mostly sat in silence, he stooped over in his chair holding a pillow with his head in his hands.  He had lived his last days recounting to me his past and now suffered the final story, the pain of ancientness.  He died at 94.  Every Father's Day I spend thinking of him and my dad, another great man I knew.  It would take volumes to recount his greatness.  My Father's Days are always filled with great memories of great fathers this father was blessed enough to know. 

This picture sits beside my chair.  My dad lays dying with the dog
Betty and I gave him to help him on his final journey.  Bob is in the corner.