Sunday Morning Musings

As I sit here in the Gilbert Infirmary this Sunday morning I'm pondering several things...

First, for most of my adult life I've kept the time schedule of an educator. That means the real beginning of the year is now, with the fall semester. Everything is always new and fresh and full of hope as another round begins. However, I'm realizing that for the first time in my career at TCC (in fact, almost my entire life) I will not be present at the beginning of a new semester. At TCC that means faculty meetings and in service and the Chancellor's Breakfast and all that comes with preparing for the new year. I will miss it, particularly seeing all the friends and colleagues I've made over the years at TCC from all the various campuses. I will miss you, my friends.

Second, I desperately miss going to church, to be with my Sunday School class and department. You have been wonderful in your care of us, but I miss being with you and exploring our lives with God together. And there really is no substitute for the worship at Broadway. Listening and watching online is one thing, but it is not being there in the midst of the people of God and worship at Broadway is a thoughtful, powerfully spiritual, magnificent experience. I long to be well enough to be back with you.

Third, I'm tired of the healing process on my foot being such a slow process. When I go to the Wound Clinic in HEB each week we measure growth of tissue and progress in .1 millimeters of progress which visually is hard to see. By the way, the nurses and staff there and at my Infusion Clinic are the best as is my infectious disease doctor, Steven Sotman. But its slow progress and the days slide into one another and are much the same, broken up only, not by weekends, but by my regular weekly doctor's visits. Being patient is hard, but in my devotional readings today I found this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "But everything has its time, and the main thing is that we keep step with God, and do not keep pressing a few steps ahead - nor keep dawdling a step behind." I understand this well, I just hope I have faith to live it.

Fourth, my good friend, Ron Williams, came over from Dallas on Friday and took me out to lunch and to run some errands. Ron and I have made it a practice over the years of our friendship to spend time at the Old Fish Hatchery near White Rock Lake in Dallas. We both are bird and nature watchers and our beloved Hatch is a wonderful place to escape. In The Place of Wild Things, Wendell Berry reminds us of our need of such places.

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day blind stars waiting for their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

I miss my time in the Hatch with my good friend Ron and wonder if I'll ever be able to hike the woods with him again.

But I also have heard from C. S. Lewis this morning as well. "But as organs in the Body of Christ, as stones and pillars in the temple, we are assured of our eternal self-identity and shall live to remember tha galaxies as an old tale." :-)

"Nothing that has not died will be resurrected."

The eighteenth century writer Jean-Pierre de Caussade reminds us how we must
live with the idea of God's Providence as the keystone of our lives. "He teaches us to see everything that happens as coming to us from the hand of God. God addresses us through the people we meet and the work we do, through our hopes and fears, through our moods and dreams, through the good [God] sends and the evil [God] permits. De Caussade speaks of the sacrament of the passing moment because in each moment we are confronted with an opportunity of responding to God who is present in that moment." (The River Within by Christopher Bryant)

De Caussade writes: "Now let me tell you that the will of God is all that is necessary, and what it does not give you is of no use to you at all. My friends, you lack nothing. You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more or less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for waht it is." - Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean Pierre Caussade. I often wonder if this is the real meaning of the Book of Job!?

So, I set my mind to living another day with care for the present and hope in God for the future. I'm looking for God in whatever God puts in my way today...so as not to miss the sacrament, the mystery, of the passing moment...:-).