Always thinking

I led the funeral services for both of these dear saints. She was round and heavy and happy and he was wasted and wiry and over ready to leave a few years later. One lifetime is all we get to live and get wisdom and understanding.

In my yard one spring day in 2007 as I am raking leaves, those tiny microscopic droppings of a cursed desert tree, I was thinking about all I had been reading and studying since embarking on my personal quest to find a faith for the second half of life, and suddenly, it hit me, an idea about God and faith that exploded the boxes I had struggled to fit in for decades, and I was for the next hour caught up in a beautific vision of the God of the Cosmos.

I have never been the same since that day, but,me being who I am, I set out to test and retest and think and rethink my new idea. When I shared it most met the idea with fear and suspicion, for it sounded like nothing they were taught. I would lick my wounds form such encounters and tuck the idea away for fear that someone would snatch it away and stomp it to death. An unworthy idea.

What if someone who did not have to think their way out of boxes built over hundreds of years took this idea and what if they were not afraid to explore it and take it out for others to see....would they be able to build a new, an yet an older truth and recover a wider vision of the mercy and power and plan of God?

Yes, they can and they are. And I am enjoying watching it happen.

Experiencing life from someone else's eyes

Pictures of family taken from our ugly back porch in Jackson Mississippi

That is what a well written autobiography is about. A person is describing experiences and then the feelings going on in their head and heart that those experiences create, and what was learned from those experiences. And when someone is naturally honest and self deprecating it can be a very valuable thing. A spiritual autobiography can be like living a life you never could have lived, and benifiting from the scars, wounds, and healings of another soul.

Most of us try too hard to clean up our stories even in the midst of living them. We place too high a value on the rightness of our actions and reactions since our ego and self worth are at stake.

Anne Lamott is a believer whose life was very different than mine. She kept her Jewish and Atheist friends, she stayed faithful to the feminism that birthed her personality. She stayed in the world of literature and academia. She faces life with enough honesty to say it is sometimes really full of s**t.

She has no glowing past of moral virtue to boast from, she was immoral, did drugs, became an alcoholic. And she is forgiven. Those of us who were raised in the morals and virtures of the faith have a much harder time admitting our failures and need.

I love it when people accept that life has really hard parts, people not healed, early death, suffering, bad relationships, without having to tip toe around spiritual platitudes that we evangelicals love to repeat. She is gritty and real.

I wish I still had atheist friends to hang around and experience life with, and to ask the questions together.

Finally feeling human again

So proud of Zach Johnson, a man of faith and small stature who conquered one of the longest courses the pga play with his grit and finess. I am so enchanted by those hawaiian islands and jeolous of the men on the tour who start the year with their families with an extended time in paradise. I heard that Matt Kuthur and family will be staying of three islands during this trip to catch some surfing on the Big Island after Maui and Oahu. Fun

I am back from a few days of not being able to think clearly. I have been reading an autobiography of the faith journey of Anne Lamont and saw that she agrees that a really bad cold can be as debilitating as a serious illness at times.

I picked up this book, "Travelling Mercies" on super sale a while ago and am finding what a gifted writer she is, and how gracious God is to seek and save people with such backgrounds as her where faith and belief where held in such suspicion by her surroundings and family. She is able to take a memory from her life and fill it with word pictures that create absolute wonder in your mind.

Worst. Cold. Ever!!

Maybe the flu? First the first time in a long time i stayed in bed all day. Managed to lead services. My stomach and ribs are aching from the coughing fits.

Enjoy watching the first Golf Tournament of the year in Maui. Such a beautitul peace of land, and the Bay there is great for snorkeling and apparently with trade winds it becomes a surfers paradise.

The Three Stage Miserable Cold

My Kitty does not really watch TV, I was playing with the settings on my small camera the other night to get a fisheye look.

I brought a bug into the new year. One of those colds that goes from head to throat to chest. Yesterday I just rested and allowed the TV to provide entertainment, along with a really good time travel novel I got on Kindle for free. Billed itself as a young adult, time travel, historical, crime and murder mystery and it really held up to the bargain.

There is no joy in Tuscaloosa this morning at the might Tide got rolled last night. Not a storied ending for the fine quarterback. But losing is good for you on occasion.

Today I will try not to infect my friends as I get some sunshine down at the Duke playing a round of golf.

Zoolights evening

We had not been in several years and found much improvement in this highly successful fundraising event for the Zoo. 3.7 million lights and hundreds of figures and a moving show on the lake with music. A very mild evening made it a special family time.

January 1, 2014

Hello 21 year old version of me, you are still alive and well in 63 year old me. I wish I could tell you to go easy on the carbohydrates after you turn 30.

My My Time Flies, its 2014, and for half the year I am 63 and half the year 64. Began this blog half way through 2008 and this is post 2010, and I appreciate each of you who stop by when your browsing to see what I am experiencing and photographing and thinking about.

I have a small life, we all do. and our time here is brief.

I profess a love for humanity, but Laura is at this moment standing in a crowd of greed crazed purse seekers on super sale day and just told me that she is seeing what levels people competing for the same items can descend to advance there own needs in this world. This has always been true, but when you see it up close it can shock you. I warned her, but she says its still fun to be a part of it on handbag sale days.

Its been a year since I bought a man purse and I still love carrying my stuff when I need it. I get the women purse connection.

I am enjoy the 125th Rose Bowl only as a background to the first day of the year which provides a memory connection to the years I have enjoyed.

Hope all of you have a great day and a great year, for there really are no small people, and no small places, Happy New Year.