It occurs to me…

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to week and a time to laugh, a time to morn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.  Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

I can’t say I understand this passage, particularly the peace some people seem to find in it.  It seems to suggest that not only do I need to know what to do, but I need to know when to do it.  Not only do I need to make the right choice, but I need to make it at the right time.  At times like this I fall back on the timeless wisdom of Yogi Berra:  “You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run.  If you got timing, it’ll go.”  There, he has reduced the difficulty by half.

“When all else fails, you always have delusion.”  Conan O’Brien

Thank God for that —  though it occurs to me that my delusions seem so much more tolerable than the delusions of others.  If only others would have reasonable delusions like mine!

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive….”  C. S. Lewis

Ah, forgiveness!  So readily received, and so reluctantly given.  Yet it is, as Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, a two-way street – a bumpy, difficult two way street (at least in that one “giving” lane), but a two-way street nonetheless.  While it is not an easy journey, Lewis provides at least some advice on how to travel a bit more easily in the “giving” lane: “Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember this is how He loves us.  Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves.  For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco….”

From Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Weber:

“[W]hat we celebrate in the saints is not their piety or perfection but the fact that we believe in a God who gets redemptive and holy things done in this world through, of all things, human beings, all of whom are flawed….  I keep making mistakes, even the same ones over and over.  I repeatedly attempt (and fail) to keep God and my fellow humans at arm’s length.  I say no when I should say yes.  I say yes when I should say no.  I stumble into holy moments not realizing where I am until they are over.  I love poorly, then accidentally say the right thing at the right moment without even realizing it, then forget what matters, then show tenderness when it’s needed, and then turn around and think of myself way too often….  I simply continue to be a person on whom God is at work.”

Flawed, of course, but that last line is the clincher.  “I simply continue to be a person on whom God is at work.”

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From the poem The Life of a Day by Tom Hennen:

“We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real.”

I read this and, once I got past the guilt of conviction, a couple of things came to mind.

A Don Williams song: “I got high hopes that tomorrow, is gonna be better than today.  I don’t look like its comin’, I know, buy why not believe it anyway.”

And Matthew 6:34: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

It is so easy to reject or set aside today in hopes of a better tomorrow, especially once you get to, say, 10:00 a.m..  It is easy at that point (sometimes earlier) to tell myself “no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for.”  But of course, today is the hand dealt today, and who knows what tomorrow’s hand will be, if it is dealt at all.  So, how do I play this hand?

“Because the holy things we need for healing and sustenance are almost always the same as the ordinary things in front of us.”  Accidental Saints Nadia Bolz-Weber

This rings true to me.  Yet, as I say that, I recognize that much of life is spent looking for the next new thing that will make life complete.  Advertisement is of course built on that pitch.  The new car, the new phone, this product or that, this medication or that.  If only you had [fill in the blank] it could be you in this picture of the smiling family, the good looking significant other, the couple holding hands on a porch, each in separate tubs (really!) or walking on the beach in all white clothing (come on, who wears all white on the beach?)

Advertising and that voice inside my head aside, all I really need for healing and sustenance is always what is in front of me.  Which brings to mind this, apologies to the Stones.  You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you HAVE what you need.

Photo taken yesterday on Lady Bird Lake in Austin

I am grateful for insight.

Life rolls along pretty well with me just “knowing things.”  When I turn a faucet handle, water comes out.  When winter comes it gets colder.  It gets dark at night.  Mostly, golf balls I hit curve to the right.  These things I know to be true, but if I am honest, I have to admit I don’t really understand them.  I don’t know the “why” or I know it only in a very general sense.  There is a pump or water tower that creates pressure.  The relative position of the sun and earth.  A flawed swing.

But every now and then I am graced with insight – a knowing beyond the superficial, a knowing not only that something is, but also how or why it is, how it is designed, assembled – how it works.

Too much of this insight , of course, would make me difficult to get along with – God knows this in his infinite wisdom.  So individually, He gives me only limited insight, limited knowledge, lest I become intolerable (or even more so).  This, of course, seems unfair.  Why doesn’t he trust me with knowing it all!  (See the “intolerable” reference above.)  It occurs to me that perhaps, just perhaps, He sprinkles this knowledge around to keep us from being intolerable, yes, but also thinking that somehow we may pool our knowledge and insight to collectively figure things out.

A piece from Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton:

“All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning, and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage or seeds.

So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter in the morning, lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard, dies young.”