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Once upon a timeWednesday, December 13, 2017
From Isaiah 40 We sang sometimes, Margaret and I, on Sunday nights at our Christian Church in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois. One weekend we put together a short medley of choruses which ended with these verses from Isaiah. And we added a simple tagline, "Teach me Lord, teach me Lord to wait." Oh what a teacher our God is. Waiting for his day to rise up in the sky, my Waynesville friend Earl never got to ride in Adagio, my once-upon-a-time hot air balloon, but he did carve a balloon onto our farewell plaque so many years ago, with the reminder to remember 1 Thessalonians 4:17. In the 1970's Simon and Garfunkel looked ahead: "How terribly strange to be seventy." Is it? Now? In the video they are young. Now they are seventy. So ... what? So what? God's presence is always right now. He offers me the sacrament of the present moment, not back then, not tomorrow, only now, in my lived life, in the sis-boom-bah of every single heart beat. I am grateful for the grace to remember. But the memories fade slowly into hazy half-life. They do not really belong to me any more than the regularly remarkable gifts God keeps showering on each of us. We live in time, and time passes, and we fly away. What is indeed timeless does not begin or end in my memories, my body, not my life. God holds it all, covers me with eternity and brings all of it home at last to him. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God; like grains of sand they cannot be numbered. You show us how to live and fill our minds with peace that surpasses understanding. Do not let me put myself to shame, O Lord, by looking elsewhere. You are all I want, you are all I need. |
And a long ago time it was, time it was ... I have a photograph.