Except that it really doesn't, because it's taught me so much, and filled my life with such grace.
It's not the grace of God wrapping me in His Arms, and holding me close while I weep.
It's the grace of holding others while they weep, the grace of honouring and encouraging effort, the grace of not being here, but being there for someone else.
Someone once said that where two are more are gathered in His Name, He'll be there.
You've got to the one of them.
You've got to show your heart, in everything you do.
In every word you speak, reflect His Compassion.
Let everything you build, from a child's Christmas toy to a birdhouse to a barn to an aeroplane be His Altar.
And let every word you write be part of the love letter to God that is your life.
Music from Tommy James and the Shondells, with Draggin' The Line.
Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.
I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.
Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.
Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.
Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.
If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.
Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.
We all have dreams; two of mine are to be a successful novelist, and to build - from scratch - and fly an aeroplane.
Both will likely remain unfulfilled. Cancer's eating me away, now, with high fevers and an inability to keep food down.
Cue the sad violins.
Not.
There's a line from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade that sticks with me.
Are you doing this for your glory, or His?
The way I see it, our glory requires results; the book prominently displayed at Barnes and Noble, the aeroplane coming alive to the engine, under one's hands, the hands that built it.
But God's glory is something else. His sole desire for us is to come alive in Christ, and that can ever be only a process in this life. We can reach for the Christ-life, but we will fail, in word and in deed.
His glory is our willingness to try, and then try again.
My novels may never reach millions, and the ones still in progress may never be written, but the act of working on them sharpens my appreciation for His Grace, and informs the blog - well, yeah, this one - that I do maintain.
And I can take pleasure in a small job upon the aeroplane, done well. I give my best effort, and it's rewarded with a satisfaction that is not entirely temporal. God takes what I've built; and He's delighted.
Our goals will never, in the end, sustain us. There'll always be another novel, another aeroplane.
But His goals - for us - what we do there, they're what touches His Heart.
Music is a blast from the past, with Canned Heat's Going Up The COuntry.
Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.
I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.
Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.
Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.
Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.
If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.
Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.
In the West, we're all about winning. The successful life, the blessing of prosperity, the miraculous healing.
But life doesn't always work that way.
It didn't work that way for Paul, as he says in 2 Timothy 4-7:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
He didn't say he won. He finished. He was there at the end, still doing his best. There's another example of this in Stephen Ambrose's book, D-Day: On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight “that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist. The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone. “I looked at his dog tags. The name read Martin V. Hersh. I wrote the name down in a small prayer book I carried, hoping someday I would meet someone who knew him. I never did.” Pancreatic cancer is a hopeless fight; add to that non-Hodgkins lymphoma and you've got a double whammy of epic proportions. But hope does not lie in victory. Hope lies in taking the next step. Hope is showing up, just one more time. We rise from the ashes, and we grab glory. It's not how you play the game. It's that you play the game. Rather than music, here's a clip from We Are Marshall, the wonderful film about a college that had the courage to bring its football team back from the literal dead, after a November 14, 1970 plane crash that killed virtually the whole team and coaching staff (along with family and boosters).
Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.
I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.
Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.
Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.
Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.
If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.
Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.
It can be so hard to convince people of this...but terminal illness is a privilege.
Not a fell honour, nor a severe mercy, but really, a bright, burnished gift of gold and rubies, sparkling in the sun.
OK, Andrew's had way too much fun with the medicinal marijuana, yeah...
Sorry. I don't use the stuff. Nor opioids.
The thing is, you see a lot further when you sit on a giant's shoulders...and because my legs gave way long since, I'm riding on God's shoulders.
I can see vistas of which I never dreamt. Views into a reality that I never thought dying could contain.
Like the preciousness of experience.
Pain hurts, and as I write this, it hurts like, pardon me, a son-of-a-bitch. Under the arms, in the chest, in the belly, and in the groin (lymph nodes)...and oh, yeah, in the neck, and a fever of 103...again, for I've had the bloody fever for a couple of weeks...Barbara rightly says that no one would want this.
So true.
In the chiaroscuro of life, though, against the flaming darkness of pain, there is the joy.
Yesterday, a black labrador puppy turned up on our doorstep at one o'clock in the morning (as Barbara was ensuring that I did not throw up upon the sofa). And his presence brought light; all of the other dogs fell in love with him, and as I wept in pain, he crawled into my arms and said, "Hug me, and I will make it all better!"
Which worked, by the way. His worried parents did come for him, but he will be back for doggie play-dates.
And in the endless Sisyphean task of building an aeroplane from raw materials - steel and wood and cotton fabric...I was able to lay out a part, one that I will have to husband the strength to be able to cut and form.
And the goal-posts are so far away to actually finish and fly the thing. (I mean, I'd need a miraculous healing to fly it, yeah?)
But doing something meant something.
In years past, I would have scoffed at my feeble effort. But now, any step is a step.
And every step means Hope.
I've been privileged to see the real truth of these...
Faith...knowing that what I am enduring means something and can be poured out, if I'll let God do the pouring. It's not about me. It's about you, you who are reading this. It may sound kinda presumptuous, but I'm living for you. I'm writing to tell you that faith is never futile.
Hope...hope really isn't the belief that one will somehow win through...I mean, there are winners and losers. And while it is hope in the Eternal, that's not what I'm talking about. The Hope that God has given to my vision is that while I may lose, while I may not achieve my goals, the words I leave will inspire others...you...to keep going. Even if you fail, you don't fail in a vacuum, and the hope you carry is the seed for another's best efforts.
Love...the only things I ever did that were worthwhile, I did for love. Not romantic love, and not the altruistic love that sends food to Mogadishu (though that's important!). It's the love that binds us all together in God's Heart, the love that says, I'll protect you, and if need be, I'll die so that you can see another sunrise. It's the love that says, you...dear reader, dear stranger...dear lost and scared Labrador puppy...you're worth everything I have.
Because you are God's, and everything I have belongs to God.
Music from The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus (yes, really), with Remember Me.
Everybody gets their hearts broken;
get off your knees and try again.
Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.
I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.
Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.
Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.
Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.
If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.
Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.
It's just not going too well, with fevers spiking every evening, and it's getting harder to eat.
And the pain, in chest and pancreas, running on intolerable. I weep, from the severity. And from fear, of how bad it can still get.
Last night the fever went over 103, and I was puking, and then...
...and then, a lost and hungry young dog turned up on the doorstep.
I think this is God's way of saying, "It's not about how you feel. It's about what you do."
The rather large pup is safe and happy right now. Hopefully he's just lost, and we can find his owners, but if not, well. (A PS - his owners came for him, happy to find him safe!)
"You're safe, buddy."
Taking care of the least of these, and if you want to know why I go on, well, now you do.
Music from Steve Winwood, with Back In The High Life. Because, fever or not, pukin' or not, I am.
Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.
I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.
Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.
Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.
Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.
If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.
Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.
