tidings

Watching the movie "True Lies" last night, I'm reminded how much work goes into making one little piece of one film by experiencing how much work it takes to train one pilot to man the machine. In the final stages of the movie, two Harriers fly in to save the day by blowing up a bridge, which takes about 5 minutes of show time. But they didn't hire professional actors for the fly by; these guys were normal Harrier pilots from Cherry Point who probably took out a whole day of tedious preparation to perform one, tiny impressive feat of flying, and are then left behind to gaze in sceptical disbelief as Schwartzenegger hauls off in one of their birds. At any rate, the movie has numerous other good points, highly worth viewing.

Meanwhile, Kermit's down in the no-man's land of the desert dropping 500-pounders before the quiet audience of cacti and tarantulas. He cooks pasta in his room on a counter-top burner and shares space with a fellow who shares his name and they are both wise to the ways of looking after their wives from afar who need daily proof of their love.

People Matter...

Really... they do. You would not believe this statement as you drive down the highway, stand in line at the market, read the news, or toil at work. The human is now a limiting factor in the equation of business, politics, warfare, and even religion.

I am continuously burdened at my work by the way that I am not treated like I matter. And, I am not trying to be selfish, or say that "hey, what about me." But you know what I am talking about. I even have the "privilege" (if you can call it that)of working for an organization that prides itself on caring for its people...and they do, it's just that their idea of caring for people is not based upon the reality of being human. And yes, this bothers me...I have a tough time with it...it makes me tired...all the time.

However, every now and then I get a glimpse of the Glorious eternity that God has in store for us...and that glimpse comes through community. Community comes in many forms, but what is especially meaningful to me is the community that I share with close friends. Electra and I have been blessed with an albeit small, but heavily concentrated community of phenomonal friends. These folks have become family and in doing so have opened themselves up to us in a way that exposes both themselves and us as well in a vulnerable manner. We laugh, cry, drink fine wine, and LIVE together.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his small, but influential book LIFE TOGETHER remarks that "Christ lived in the midst of HIs enemies. So the Christian too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of foes." How I wish that I could live the cloistered life! But that is not where I am called to be right now...maybe later...But how important it is therefore to gather community around you! Bonhoeffer goes on to say that "Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ." Isn't that freeing!

It is through the Covenant relationships that we have been blessed with that enables the sacrament of Communion becomes most real. The sharing of life through death has become real. As we bear one anothers burdens we die unto ourselves and recieve the life giving reality of freindship. Though we live in a fallen world, and all here is lost. It is the moments with close friends that are shared through good times and bad, great conversation, and babies crying that we are able to glimpse eternity and be reminded that yes...Virginia, people really do matter.

#1 Mistake

With the change of the sun's course this month, our rose bed dominated by an original holly bush has turned into a dungeon. Kermit noticed the new sun pattern last week. I got the first big, very pictoral book on "landscaping with roses" I could find in the library and discovered: yes, #1 priority is a minimum of 6 hours of full sun. So...they survived a hot summer root bound in a pot in teh back yard of the feed store only to be stuck in a damp, dark bed next to a nubian holly bush, waving their spotty leaves at me and crying "we're not (quite) dead yet!" Project Rescue the Ramblers ensues tomorrow.

Meanwhile, my boss at work has been in charge of catering a party of 200 for a well-respected elderly gentleman in the local community. The family hired a friend to do the planning, and because said friend needed to be out of town next week, she had all the plans laid for this Sunday. The dying man went off liquids; they say he'll go any day now. My boss wonders all Saturday: to cook or not to cook? What happens if he's not dead yet by Sunday afternoon? A funereal preception? Well, we might as well invite the dear man to his own funeral. How many of us will enjoy such an opportuity when we dare to importune others by clinging on to our nearly-dead frames?

Some Images of the History

From Capon's The Fingerprints Of God:

"Only the logic of the imagination can fathom the parables-or the Bible itself, for that matter. Think of it this way. The house of human discourse has many floors; but in our time, we live entirely in the basement of propositional logic. Down there, we're surrounded by TV commercials, talk shows, police procedurals, hospital dramas, situational comedies, newspapers, radio, magazines, and Internet chitchat- every one of which inundates us with cellar talk. To be sure, every now and then a novel or a poem may invite us upstairs to experience the sunlight of imagery. But that's too much brightness for us. Soon enough, we run back down to bask under the fifteen-watt bulb of literalism. Imagery isn't just hard for us to look at; the eyes of our mind are blind to it. And as a result, we're blind to Scripture as well, because, as I've said, it's the images of Scripture that make it whole. The Bible, if you will, lives in the upper rooms of the house of discourse. It has, of course, its propositional moments, its times in the basement of language where it hangs up the socks and underwear of revelation. But its major thread, the grand clothesline on which it displays the principle garments of salvation, lies exclusively in the realm of imagery".

meandering

The roses went into the ground yesterday! Our front-entry garden is taking shape and new character, with the addition of lavender, coreopsis, Japanese daisies, and some viney ground covers. One rose is a climber with wide-open, sweet-smelling blooms, Don Juan, and the other is a bushy, purply-leaved Mocking Bird in name and varigated pink in bloom. Thanks and ongoing dedication goes to Mama Linda for the adoption of these beauties into the garden family. I hope Don Juan climbs right on up the front railing next year, to droop a nodding head of welcome to guests of the little castle!

domestic disbelief

Along with charming fall sun-shining through the irridecent leaves weather, we find our not-so-charming inner child selves tossed to and fro on the winds of change. The household becomes a bomb shelter, or perhaps a tiny tower of Babel, where we thought we had it all together and found instead our likemindedness to be a volatile weakness. What sloughs of despond, what crystal peaks of wonder--shake our skeletal frames! Therefore, young children, beware the sunny winds of September.

In the fall of the year

As the fall equinox steals up on the calendar, our very skin dances gleefully with goose bumps when the days grow dark with cool nights. Our Saturday beach trip will lose its savour when we shiver in the sandy wind. Alas, we must trade our boogey boards for clippers and turn to the bare-leggy garden, where trimming and pruning might provoke a few more bright blooms.

New Blogs!

You will notice that we recently added two new blogs to our links on the right side of the page. The first is our friend Bonnie who is blogging on "Being Transformed". Additionally, our cousin Aaron, who is an accomplished writer and has earned a very well respected name for himself in the Texas Naturalist/Biology circles is blogging on "A Water Wilderness".

Enjoy!

To Fly The Mean Machine

This past Monday marked a big day for Boards...he finally soloed the AV-8B Harrier. Normally, a solo is really not that big of a deal. Of course it is a privilege to take out a jet by yourself without an instructor putting you through your paces, but this was definitely a different story. In most aircraft you solo within a few days of flight training, not so with the Harrier. It is an aircraft that takes months to learn how to fly...and not fly well...but just learn to fly.

This is a great step for me as it means that my time as a fledgling neophyte are nearing an end. The Tactical world is now upon me and so are greater and meaner challenges.

Summer's End

While certain sections of the country have been dealing with a long, hot summer, we in eastern North Carolina have had a rather pleasant run of the season as far as summers go. No, we have not been sitting around in our jackets as some folks would have us believe we did in the days before "global warming"...interesting note, I have always remembered summers as being hot, sometimes really hot....But I digress.
Here we have had rain, a front to cool things off for a few days every few weeks, and the cool sea breezes in the evening to put an end to the humid heat of the day.

This past weekend we had our first taste of cool air for the new season. What a refreshing change a shift in wind direction can bring. With evening lows in the sixties the stars seem to blaze a little happier. The bugs sing louder, fly further; the yards are graced with yellow butterflies, flitting hummingbirds, and the evening woods are prowled by hungry coyotes, letting us know that humans are not the only creatures enjoying the new weather.

This pleasant change in weather brings for me new ideas. There is plenty of work to do on the house as it cools down and new garden plans are being laid that will make for perfect Saturday afternoon chores.

Christians who oppose drinking on moral grounds believe they have a chance to win, however small

"And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side." -Johnny Cash "The Man In Black

It vexes me greatly when Christians pretend to be religious.

thinking on death and evil

Having finished Capon's Genesis, the Movie, I'm left mulling over his principal hypotheses.

"The God who holds good and evil as an ecology not only tolerates evil--he takes full responsibiility for it." (310)

"...for all biblical and practical purposes, Satan is the alter Ego of the great I AM." (310)

"Men and women alike, we're all pregnant with death from the moment we're born....But God turns even our impregnation with death into his promise of life." (321)

"God loves death because he's made it the engine of all life; every new something rises out of the same lovely nothing that's always been his cup of tea." (346)

And finally:

"...the Bible never promises us a half-death in which our mortal body goes to corruption in the ground but our imperishable soul floats up to God on its own steam. Instead, it promises us that when we die, both soul and body will go back into the nothing out of which they were made. and when we rise, the Word who brought us out of nothing to begin with will simply do the same trick again--because while we've lost everything, he's never lost us." (346)

And God, Capon says, can put up with the evil along with the good because "God likes our being no matter what we do with it....Even in our sins, our fondness for our own existence remains a witness to the divine Fondness that holds us extra nihil and extra causas--outside nothing and outside our causes....[he likes]the being of everything more than its behaviour." (331)