Today the weather where I was shifted and transformed with each step I took. The winds would blow. Clouds would slide across the sky. Then the clouds would be moved and the sun would appear. The air would warm. Then the winds would come again and the clouds would reappear and the sun would disappear and the temperature would drop. The field would go from being lit by the sun to being an ominous opening under a leaden sky.
I love the spring here. The hardwoods are turning green again. Tiny buds appear everywhere. I see the jakes, hens, and long beards more often, too. The thunderstorms are ramping up, right on time. You can sense the coming humidity of the summers. But spring is nigh and I love it.
I’m positioned here, looking around and up and also at the miles ahead as I jog, and theological bearings are inescapable. Who authored all of this? The secularist has a nonsensical answer to that. Bearings only make sense with reference to the permanent.
Thus, even the simplest of activities–like a jog under a spring sky–bears witness to creation and its Creator.
I exited from I-85 and slowed to a stop at the traffic light at the bottom of the exit ramp, waiting to turn left when the light would turn to green. When traffic began moving, I turned left behind a pickup truck in front of me that was pulling a white trailer. I needed to stop at the Walmart before going to my place. I needed to purchase some milk and a few other small items for the week. When the next light turned red, the cars and trucks in front of me slowed and stopped, and I did, too. Then I saw her.
I think we all saw her simultaneously. She appeared to be Hispanic. She wore black socks, sandals, psychedelic pajama pants, and a camisole beneath a baggy sweatshirt. She was by herself and was pacing up and down the concrete median dividing the highway that ran in front of the Walmart. She held a white poster board with black writing that said
Need money Homeless Money go for food
and room Thank You God Bless
As we drivers waited for the green arrow to turn left into the Walmart, the girl came to each driver’s side window and tried to make eye contact. She waved. She smiled. She held the sign for what seemed a very long time, right in front of the car windows, so we would read it. Then she’d wave again.
And the sadness of the whole thing, that lasted only ninety seconds or so, pierced me. Should I give her the petty cash and quarters I have in the cup holders between my front seats? Or should I not, because she may be being pimped by some scoundrel who is at this moment watching her from the nearby parking lot? Or is she completely honest—a girl standing in the middle of the highway in front of Walmart because she cannot otherwise make ends meet but by begging on a Sunday afternoon?
What did this all say about the world? That she was here? That the other drivers and I wrestled internally about whether or not to give? That we questioned the whole world we are in? We could give and say to ourselves, “Well, it’s up to her what she does with it.” Or we could avert our eyes so as not to have to articulate our reluctance to trust, to give. What did this whole rotten situation reveal about the world?
In one moment, signs of “Hiring: $20 per hour” were visible. Yet here was a girl in pajama pants in the highway begging for money. In whom is one to trust? It seemed to me only that things are broken. When trust is followed by a question mark in our hearts, that says much—that we’re our own enemies. Yet we turn to the same demographic for help. It’s what Faulkner called the human heart in conflict with itself.
I did not see any windows roll down in order for drivers to give the girl money. We all read the sign. We watched her walk up and down beside all of our vehicles. Then the arrow turned green on the light and we drove on up to the store, paid for our goods, and pulled out of the same parking lot, and watched her again, this time holding her sign with bad grammar, before the next line of cars.
I wanted to give, I wanted to say. But I know that my intentions did nothing for her. It is action that counts.
But I wanted to say, You will, perhaps, understand one day that things are complicated, that people can be both blessings and curses, that we feel the embarrassment and awkwardness, too. And that sometimes when we don’t know what to say, it comes out as “Thank you” and “God bless,” and we feel as empty and necessary as words.
I’m a latecomer to the fiction of Ian McEwan. Crowds of readers, it seems, have read him for years, since the 1970s, even. I see why now. His writing is lyrical. It reminds me of Updike, an American writer whose work he adored.
There are sundry similarities: people on the edge; people estranged; people going through the motions; and, of course, prurience. Lots of it. Sensuality–its pressing upon youth, especially; its mysteries; its unspoken desires.
I’m almost through my first reading of this collection of McEwan’s short stories. They are, I admit, hard to read at times. The language is beautiful but their subject matter and the graphic nature of detail … well, it can (as I’m sure was his goal) discomfit the reader.
McEwan portrays human perversion in ways that parallel watching a Criminal Minds episode. Perhaps the scariest part, for me at least, is contemplating the likelihood that the world is actually more like what McEwan explores than we care to admit.
His characters include mentally unstable youth and adults; nude retarded Thespians; solitary murderers who want, paradoxically, and Raskolnikov-like, to be included; incestuous tykes, and more. Read McEwan, but be ready; this is not fare for the fragile.
Over recent days the displays of power, color, cold, sunrise, sunset, clouds, water, snow, and more gave rise to a simple question: What makes more sense, that God is the supreme, sovereign Artist or that all of these are ‘accidents’ of blind material chance that cannot account for their origins, nor I mine?
Pictured above is our backyard 26 hours ago.
Below is from today when I was getting a walk in along the golf course.
Below is from the bridge overlooking the river.
Below is a picture from our hotel balcony in FL.
This last one is from a ridgeline I often hike near our home.
Boy, the secularists sure do have to ascribe a lot of power, imagination, artistry, design, nuance, irreducible complexity, and much, much more to . . . nothing. Seems suppression of evidence is their default position.
Seems to me creation bears witness to intelligence. Supreme and perfect intelligence. And beauty. It’s as if God has revealed Himself so much that we are without excuse by denying creation and its Author’s sovereignty.
Ever have one of those days that you could not have manufactured, a day in which you heard something that moved you deeply, or saw sights that you knew right away would remain with you for your life?
And I don’t mean a spectacle like a mountaintop experience or a cruise in Alaskan waters or sunsets on Oahu. For me, it was just a day with fellow soldiers and with a speaker who shared a message from my favorite book of the Bible: Ecclesiastes.
One of America’s great warriors, now a civilian pastor, still preaching the gospel to soldiers and civilians alike, spoke to me and my fellow soldiers. His theme was straight from Ecclesiastes: Don’t miss God for anything else. Why? Because anyone and anything else is–by design–less than. There is God, and then there is everything else. There is the Creator, and there is the created.
Solomon unpacked this fundamental theme for 12 chapters throughout Ecclesiastes. He wrote about what he called “the end of the matter” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). He wrote of ultimate things. He wrote of how he squandered much of his life “under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 5:8-7:24). He called it vanity, emptiness, vexation, roping of the wind, futility.
The speaker today, like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, spoke to younger men, trying to warn them not to lose their souls by gaining this world and forfeiting their souls. He shared his own experiences. He connected them to Solomon’s wisdom.
And who knows if the message will take root in the souls of these young men? I hope so. I had a friend years back who was a great encourager to me when I was pastoring. He said, “Jon, we sow the seeds but only God can till the heart.” He was exactly right.
We do what we can. We open the text. We proclaim it. We explain it. We teach it. We hold it forth. But unless and until God tills the soil of the human heart, it’s unheeded wisdom. If wisdom is unheeded, it remains neglected and rather a knowledge, not wisdom. The distinction is that wisdom is knowledge appropriately applied, lived out.
Hence, my love of Ecclesiastes. Solomon was a man who made a lot of blunders, but he had the humility and wisdom, inconsistently for sure, to try and reach those he loved.
As Solomon penned, again today we all saw it: “The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises” (Ecclesiastes 1:5). We have another shot at it, to hear wisdom and embrace it, to live it out. Or we will suppress it, mock it, scoff at truth, and to turn away.
I have a great privilege, the opportunity to hold forth the message of hope, of reconciliation, of redemption, of forgiveness, of wisdom.
May God till many hearts.
Time will tell.
May we learn, in the time allotted to us, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, and that wisdom is much more than a cognitive and theological construct; it is, rather, a person who took on flesh, bore the sins of His people, and conquered the world’s folly, to rise three days later, as proof that the wisdom of God overcomes the pride of men.
As I drove home, I surveyed the land and sky. A cemetery with patriots and others. An orange sky. America’s colors unfurled with evening wind. I lifted my phone. Snapped a picture. Why? To remember. What exactly? That the men and women are now removed from here. That their lives here are now (perhaps?) reduced to a bromide or dates or relationships on a slab of gray concrete or marble.
One’s theology is crucial.
Teach me to number my days. One life. Make it count. For the truth.
When the sun goes down, and one perhaps reflects, the thought invariably comes: “How are you spending your days? Make them count.”
I know folks who may prefer the mountains or the woods (I get that completely) but there is something about the sounds of the waves on the sandy shore, and the breeze from the ocean, and the sounds of the sea fowl, and the way that dolphins swimming parallel with the shoreline inside the sandbar, makes us all smile and bristle with excitement like children.
We simply behold what is, and delight.
I just returned from a few days with fellow soldiers. The team of which I’m a part got to pour into fellow soldiers. We taught skills in communication, stress management, money personalities, personality types and personality patterns, and more.
But most of all, we spent time together sharing and getting to know one another and deepening relationships with one overarching goal: resilience. Being able to take a punch, so to speak, but get back up and keep going. Bouncing back. And recognizing that we don’t fight alone but as a team; therefore, we ought to invest first of all in people.
I was able to spend time with guys whose skills far surpass mine. They are faster, stronger, and more agile. But what our team did, I think, succeed in was planting seeds of spiritual maturation that can take root and bear fruit, both in the short-term and in the long-term, over their careers and future lives.
We enjoyed some seafood in the evening, walked miles along the shores, took in the sounds and smells that the beach affords, patronized some tacky t-shirt stores, bought overpriced coffee, and more.
But it was worth it. Why? Speaking for myself alone, I think it’s because we sometimes need to get away from the familiar to recapture what ultimately matters and why we do what we do. For me (one who tends to prefer mountains and woods and ridge lines), water, sun, sand, and each other are hard to beat.
Salute to the soldiers I’m privileged to serve, the Unit Ministry Team of which I’m a part, my mentors, my family, my unit, and to the Author of all good things.
MIND & MATTERS 