I Can Only Imagine

I was reminded yesterday of the limits of technology.  I had classes and meetings all day and late into the evening and all of it was on Zoom, an app that allows video of everyone on screen together.  It works great and you can see everyone and talk, teach and meet live.  However, by 6:30 last night I was longing for a real human being, a flesh and blood, fully realized human presence in my life.  By grace I had my lover and our youngest here with me.  But that is not what I realized.  In the last several weeks God has reaffirmed in me the need for real, living, presence.  Not just human presence but trees, dogs, birds singing, ivy growing, irises dark with colored life, green moss, earth smelling like earth, rivers flowing, rain, sunshine, and my lover at 98.6°.  We are so made three-dimensionally alive as is our world and all that makes it the earth and it is all free, free, free.  Oh, what awaits us when we read that this whole world is broken and even groans to be fully realized and yet is so meaningfully helpful to our well-being. Someday we will look back on our life here and realize that it was more akin to a Zoom life than real life and we will turn once more toward Him and sing, “Halleluiah, Halleluiah, Praise You Almighty, Maker of our new heavens and earth.  I Can Only Imagine.  

Someday even Fair Haven will be but a Zoom of our eternal Haven.

  

Collaboration

I was reminded yesterday of the importance of co-labor-(ration).  We are all in this together and will emerge from it better if we commit to co-labor with one another in not only following the quarantine guidelines from our medical community but also in finding creative ways to be with and help one another.  The first reminder came at Pinson Mounds, a local National Archeological Park.  My family has been going there for years to picnic and walk their many trails and it is normally deserted but yesterday there were several family groups there walking with us.  We each maintained our safe distance but as we passed each other everyone sincerely greeted us with smiles of affirmation for what we were doing and the safety our distancing was giving all of us.  We were all co-laboring together.  The second reminder came in the late afternoon.  Our daughter Sissy and her husband Bo had set up a Zoom meeting with our whole family to visit, joke, cut up, encourage and pray with and for one another.  What a joy for Betty and me.  It was different, 17 people on one screen and youngsters starved for attention or with limited attention made for a certain learning curve but we did it and look forward to doing it again soon.  Let me encourage all of us to see this as a collaboration with the whole world as we each sincerely seek to save us all but being kind and considerate in the process.  God is for us so who or what can be against us.  Happy distancing trails.  

Our crazy co-labor, (ration)

Don't You Just Love God!

My wife and I love the backroads of life, trails marked and unmarked, the meandering roads that allow us to live the journey as we gain our destination.  One thing I love about Tennessee’s backroads is the nearness I feel to those that live along these byways.  Interstate travel is mostly devoid of contact with humans but lots of people live along backroads and nothing is more revealing, interesting and entertaining than how people develop their homestead.  Yesterday we drove across the state on a backroad and two events touched us deeply.  One was Cookeville and the grit of its citizens as they work to reclaim what the tornadoes failed miserably to take away.  Homes, now turned to rubble lined the road but in the midst of it we passed a great ambassador for the human race.  A middle-aged woman was walking her front yard picking up debris.  Atop the hill sat her mangled home, roofless and windowless, uninhabitable but of no consequence to the owner, she was rebuilding, a little bit at a time, she was doing what we are designed to do, recreate.  Later as we wound down the plateau to middle Tennessee we passed a home that had several angels out front made of car parts with car doors as wings.  The creativity of the human being always stirs me with hope.  We turned around to go back and look again, and again was rewarded by the acts of humans recreating.  No human can create but One, whose loving-kindness is beyond comprehension, has filled our lives and our world with all that we need for recreating.  Don’t you just love God!  

Hope!!!

A Great Gate Way Drug

Wow, back to back sunny days.  What a gift.  My wife and I spent most of yesterday doing yard work, a gateway drug to appreciative good health.  We should all be involved in making much of the earth we are given.  Making much of the earth makes much of us and, whether or not you believe, it is a grand stance of obedience to God.  His plan is for humans to care for the earth, the Bible records His command thus; “Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it;”.  Subdue means to make the earth serve us.  We all know of examples of where this has gone disastrously wrong but just because people mess up doesn’t mean His command is any less a command.  Perhaps the greatest fulfillment of that command is to allow the earth to do what it does best, grow things, and then help it to grow the things you enjoy like trees, flowers, green grass, fruits, vegetables and moss.  The added benefit is its narcotic effect on your attitude.    

Why is the sky blue?

Yesterday was one of those glorious days that promises so much hope for our future.  It was beautiful, mild, clear and brightly sunny.  After what has seemed like months of rain and disconcerting news a day like that goes a long way in repairing our struggling attitude.  This is important because so often our media and our devices that feed it to us creates a national bad attitude.  We are not so much bothered by our own bad attitude but the bad attitude of others is intolerable.  The problem is our bad attitude is intolerable to all our others and over time all this bad attitude just makes America something we don’t want to be around.  And then out pops the sun and blue skies and all of a sudden, we all seem to be better and more contented and less focused on our problems and more focused on our hopes and dreams.  In all this lies a secret, the secret of gratitude.  Gratitude is a human state that makes for a great attitude, it sounds simple but is really profound, gratitude produces gratitude and gratitude is a basis of a great attitude.  But therein lies a problem for most humans, who or what to be grateful to for sunshine and blue skies?  That is a great question and one worth great effort to answer.  Who makes the sun shine and the sky blue?  And when you find that or Who answer you have found the Pearl of Great Value.      

Our blue sky Wednesday.

The Cure Of A New Routine

It is raining.  We are quarantined.  What to do?  Routine is very important when you find yourself in a prolonged state of being out of your regular routine.  Life is made peaceful and comfortable because we seek, create, and live in routine; life is made exciting when we live outside our routine and difficult when we are forced to, like by a deadly virus.  In our new normal it is important that we establish a new routine.  Try to keep as much of your old routine as possible, that’s where to begin to build your new routine, then add things that are first, necessary, second needful and last enjoyable.  Establish times every day to do those tasks you have long put off and times that you focus on your relationship, caring for others and contacting those who might need an encouraging word or Facetime.  Have a news source that your trust preferably a single voice that is updated daily and stay informed but also limit your exposure.  Once you have established the new routine STICK TO IT.  You will find that your new routine will help you to pass the quarantined days more easily and more rapidly, become a stabilizing daily force and keep you occupied so the news doesn’t.  I have suffered long bouts of quarantine in my life and have found that routine is one gift you can give yourself to get through it.   

PS:  This is a good time to begin what is the most important routine you will ever have, time alone with God.  Include reading scripture as a way to listen to Him and then talk directly to Him as if He were sitting in the room with you, which He is, and then read, write, do, meditate, think and create as a means to make much of Him and your new time with Him. 

A massive boulder we saw on our hike last week.  

Little Orangey

My wife and I went hiking this past week to Frozen Head S.P.  It was a beautiful hike, spring with all its hopes is coming.  At one point we saw a tiny salamander, bright orange with black dots, just lying beside the trail.  It was so cold it could barely move.  We marveled at it and were so grateful we got to see it.  At dinner that night my wife prayed for its safety.  I followed her kind example and did the same in our closing prayer of our day.  I love God.  He fills us with love overflowing even into the life of a little salamander.  Seek God and go hiking.