Scattered Writings of a Blogger

It had been a hard week.  I was weary and wanted to be anywhere but miles away from home, late in the day, yet there I was.  As we drove through the grocery store parking lot, we noted a van in one space and on the opposite side of the road a young man with an electric violin, amplifier, and FX box (that he could loop music through).  He had placed a sign on the grassy verge.  I'd seen only enough of the sign to know he was asking for help of some sort.    We watched as children tumbled from the van and saw the man wave them back with his bow. As we sat in the pharmacy drive thru, I let the car window down a little.  At that moment the violinist began to play.  Music wafted around us on the breeze. The music was beautiful and ethereal.   I didn't recognize the piece and wondered if it was an original composition.  Whoever composed it, the music was lovely and soothing and soared in the cold air, seeming to become part of the ch...

When I worked at the nursing home, I met a patient who had terminal lung cancer.  His name was James.   James had spent his life living rather hard.  He'd been in airplane crashes in the Korean war, car accidents, bar fights and had been badly burned in a housefire caused by a burning cigarette that dropped one night as he slept.  Admittedly his appearance was off-putting.  He was missing some portion of some of his fingers and had scars on his arms and hands, though he wore long sleeved shirts to hide what he could.  His hair had never quite grown back in a place or two, and what was left was gray and thin.  One ear was notched and missing a portion of the outer rim.  He was battle scarred by the life he'd lived.  When I met James for the first time, I took one look at him and thought of an old dog I had dearly loved  named Mutt.  Mutt was torn and scarred by his life chasing and catching bears and wildcats in the woods, indul...

  I noted something the other day, as I was making bread.  I follow the same recipe I have now been using for years.  Each time I measure out the sugar, the yeast, the water, the flour, the oil, the salt.  In breadmaking I don't guesstimate. I might guess when making biscuits or cornbread or muffins or pancakes, but with bread, I take care.  I measure.  I mix it in the exact same way every single time.  I use the very same cycles on my bread machine.  I time the last rising of the bread and heat my oven to the very same temperature and when I place that bread pan in the oven, I time it the same number of minutes that I've learned it requires in my oven. I do make mistakes at times, but I can pretty well tell you when a loaf fails why it has failed and what I missed.  But there are other times when the dough is just not right without any mistake at all being made.  Why?  Same amount of yeast, sugar, water, flour, salt and oil.  ...

  I have been reading the last book of the Elliot family trilogy,  The Heart of the Family  by Elizabeth Goudge and the opening chapters were hard, so hard, to read.    That morning they were hard to read though I've never noted before they were so difficult.   But Saturday morning they were hard and heavy and I could have wept for the characters whose souls were tortured by nerves and near madness and deep despair.   It brought back too clearly the days when I lived in those dark places and couldn't see enough light to find even a tiny crack to reassure me that light existed. Perhaps too it was brought on by the knowledge that some I love dearly are suffering at the moment, in their own dark places.   And the knowledge that there are others whom I don't know, struggling and straining, attempting to hold on to the very last bits of what remains of sanity and salvation and feeling they shall never find their way out of the dark deep ...

  Each time I come across the story of David, I can't help but look at the story of Michal, daughter of Saul, first wife of David.   Here is a woman all too often maligned for her behavior towards David when he danced before the ark as it was brought home but can we just stop and look at her from a human level?  The Bible is a true accounting of  humans  and  human nature as much as it is of God's nature.  We can't slice off one without getting some of the other.   We are intertwined even though we might choose to think otherwise.  And while human emotions are often tangled and confusing to us, they do serve a purpose to show us God's nature in some form.   After all, it is God who created emotion within each of us. So let us look closely at Michal for a little bit, shall we?  What made her as she was?  When David was a youth (supposedly between 16 and 19 years of age), he was an experienced shepherd.  He wa...

  I haven't been able to get out in the yard more than a time or two since September.  So this evening, I made up my mind that I was going to go out.  I knew it would be dark by 7pm but there was a half hour and here I was longing to go outdoors.  So outdoors I went.   I cut herbs: chives, oregano, mint and the teeny basil that never did much after the late planting.  I cut coleus (4 varieties) and moss rose (also called portulaca) which was begun from a cutting and popped in a container mid-summer.   Then I went out to the shed flower bed where the cosmos, zinnia, and marigolds had bloomed so much that it was ample compensation for the frustrating lack of flowers all summer long.  And that's where I discovered something I'd never known and which filled me with awe.  I discovered how bumble bees sleep on these cool autumn nights.  They'd tucked themselves deep and tight into the center of zinnias and cosmos and buzzed sleepily ...