The Whole Point Of Hope

I have projects that I'm very unlikely to live to complete.

They're long-term, physically gruelling, and looking at where I am, where cancer is...well, it's not going to happen. Walking up three steps from the porch to the front door is a challenge...and he wants to build an aeroplane...and fly it.

Yeah, well.

But I'll keep going. Not so much in the hope that maybe God will heal me, maybe maybe maybe...but more in the hope that I can be a man about all this, and not simply yield to fate.

There's more to life than palliative care, more than a drugged descent into degradation.

Not because 'maybe'.

Because definitely.

I can die facing forward.

Die like a man.

 The point of hope is not denial,

I hope you understand.

Its purpose is to wear a smile,

and dying, play the man

with a bright and cheerful face,

with work of sternest discipline,

for it is thus that our Lord's grace

empowers us to win

the laurels becoming golden crown

when we pass through Heaven's gate,

and though it tempts to wear a frown

in facing Earthly fate,

just think ahead, and look to see

the future of your victory.

The Five Minute Friday prompt this week is ACCUMULATE.

I'd like to gather up God's grace,

accumulate it, all in bags

so that it would not share its space

with my virtues, filthy rags,

but that's just not how this thing works,

God's big thing is healing hurt,

and He spends His Love on jerks

like me, who wallow in the dirt

like pigs so happy in the pen 

(no, they do not want a bat Andh!),

but this is now and that was then

and this will be my epitaph:

Clean me up, God, as You could,

but let me still smell my old mud.

And if anyone read my comment on the Five Minute Friday link for this week, here's a picture of Barb's Flying V tenor ukulele, in progress.

Golden crown and ICE CREAM, says Sylvia.

But no mud.