Where To Be Cleaned

I drove over to the soda kiln this morning.  It was dark and cold, yesterday clothes pulled on over an old weary body, ragged army coat, thermos of coffee.  This kiln roars and I hear it as soon as I open my truck door.  It is a wild thing in the woods.  I sit in an old soft bench beside it to be kept warm for the next two hours.  The Ancient Of Days, fire, night, roar, the The Still Voice, and me.  The stars circle above.  The earth spins toward our star.  Another day starts right—being cleansed from all my unrighteousness.   

   

Getting Saved

The older I get the less able I am to live the life that is given me.  It is too overwhelming, a magnificent meaning of the indescribable and unimaginable being played out inside me.  The paradox, it is not excited adventure but sacramental stillness; I cannot “not be” enough to be who I need to be to experience the life that I am living.  Who will save me from this busy man I am?...

Yesterday Was A Day

I talked to a man in my office yesterday, a black man.  I was listening to him reminisce about what it meant to be a black man.  He told of his grandparents in a wagon pulled by mules secreting away to West Tennessee from Mississippi, traveling by night, hiding in the trees by day.  He talked and talked spiraling around his tale until it became so tight he spilled over.  He quietly related the day Martin Luther King Jr. died.  He was in the fifth grade.  “He was our Moses, he was going to bring us all forward” he exclaimed.  On that day his teacher cried and cried and then he said, “that was a bad day, a bad, bad day.”  “OH GOD” he said, like a man swept over the falls crying out to the only one he thought just might save him.  He put his head in his hands and began to weep, slowly shaking his head back and forth, crying and crying.  Silently the tears seeped through his fingers and dropped to his trousers, “He was gonna save us all and they killed him”.  I knew in some way I was his “they”.  Yesterday was a day. 

Loaded Lucky White Dice

I was meeting with three black men yesterday listening to them tell of their experiences from their perspective when one of them said, “I’ve always wondered why the blacks where picked to be slaves, why was that our cross to bear?”  I had never thought of it that way, how many people groups there are in the world and why this particular one was chosen to be the slave one and how that issue must haunt the souls of so many of its citizens.  Why were the black humans the ones chosen?  It is not so much slavery, which is heinous in it self, that haunted this man; it was the categorizing of him as a human as belonging to the race that was chosen to be the slave group.  “I’ve never understood that” he softly said looking off into the heavens.  Not only had my white heart never understood it, it had never even thought it. When I think of my group I think of “pioneers”; which is another example of the privilege of my whiteness.   Will humans ever be of the human race instead of races of colors?  I never think of myself as a “white” man but only a man.  Why must a man think of himself as a color first and then as a man?  That is a cross I have never borne. 

Living...Outside of Time

Sometime the flood of living that occurs while spending our first hours with God is more than time can accommodate.  It comes from spending it with Someone who is unbound by time nor concerned with its passage.  One of the great understandings of life is that it can be larger than the time you’re given to live it. 

That’s when you smile and hold on.