"The Times They Are A-Changin"--A Blog Update

      The Catch-22 of having a blog is that you actually need to write blog posts. And there are a few things about writing blog posts that you need to have.  You need time and a clarity of mind; neither of which I feel like I've had for quite sometime. And the other thing about having a blog is that you need to keep them it to date or by the time you sit down to finish that post begun so very long ago, the event has passed you and what occurred had its effect and your life has moved on at a vaporous rate. And that is where we're at right now. I have a cache of drafts sitting in the wings waiting to be finished, but the moment has passed and in some cases it has long passed us. I still want to post them and still may, but it also may be better to just let them sit for my own viewing pleasure. But we'll see. I may post them to let you in on something that meant something to me many months ago and will, I'm sure, conjure those once felt feelings, the moment I sit down to finish the post.

     As I've said many times, I love this little blog. I may never write a decent post and I will most likely never strike it big writing, but I will always remember the day I learned about the idea of having a "blog" and then going about to set one up for myself. I felt as if I had discovered something so special I could hardly describe my exact feeling and I remember how grand it felt to "publish" my very first paragraph long post. It felt as if I was making history and doing something more monumental than just writing. I realize that everyone and their pets have blogs these days and that many people who became famous or well-known due to a blog have moved onto other mediums like tumblr and instagram. And that is fine. I still like knowing in the back of my mind that I write a little blog that a few people read. I like knowing that at different times during each day there are people all over the world looking up little things and somehow their fingers and their mouse find their way to words that I once wrote. I hope my words are both meaningful and helpful and that they guide the eyes and minds reading them to something more and something better.

    And so, I have made little resolutions in the past to publish a post once a week and I've made others to just write more often and this post is sort of another attempt to tell you that I'm still here and that I still have the desire to write and continue to have a blog. However, I'm not going to tell you that they'll be many more posts coming and then write a few, publish them, and then fall off the wagon again. I know that'll be the case, but as the title says, things here are changing. My sweet little family has been living in and amongst a raging storm over the past three years and we've made it work, but nothing has been easy. I'm in no way saying that its all been terrible, or that God has left us high and dry, or that there haven't been many moments within those three years where we wanted to stop the very earth on it's axis and freeze the time and suck the marrow out of it, because that would be far from the truth. God has seen us through so many things and I'll write about those in time. I will say that everything I've ever thought about life is wrong and has been rearranged, broken, shuffled, and then rebuilt and there is much that it may take the rest of my living days to ever truly understand. And for now, all I will really say is that God is good, true, severely merciful, savagely faithful, and ever-present. And for right now in our lives, the most true verse in Scripture is, "Be Still and know that I'm God." (Psalm 46:10). And being still is so very hard when you feel as if life and the earth itself is about swallow you whole and pull with you everything that you once held dear. But we've reached a safe harbor right now. And I cannot fully explain to you the respite that we feel, but to attempt to even come close to describing how it feels is that it feels that we are alive once again thrown together with the sensation of getting to breathe good air after feeling as if you were suffocating.

    I'm in no way saying that the rest of our lives will be easy because I'd lay good money on the fact that it won't. It's not suppose to be. How could we long for heaven and the great return of the Christ and be raised on wings of eagles if life were easy and all was smooth. However, we've reached a place now, mentally and physically, where the waves are no longer crushing us and the wind is not driving us away from where we've been trying to push towards. We've reached a place where we can once again begin having a the peace we once had. And I say all of this to let you know that there will be many more posts. I have seen it attributed to many different writers, so I'll not award it to anyone special, but there is a quote about writers and it says something to the effect that writers always write; they have to because its in them. Please know I'm in no way saying that I can write or that I have this great hidden talent to put thoughts into words, but I will say that words and ideas are always floating through my head and that I'll someday be wise enough to record them before I've allowed them to be molded into something I no longer recognize and spend the next great amounts of time trying to remember the beauty and cadence with which they first came to me.

   It is late now as I write this and new day has already begun and my sweet wife has gone off to bed and my dear son lays so quietly at rest in his "big boy" bed. I cannot fully write of the blessings that God has bestowed on my head in what little of this life I've lived. I have been living day to day in this great wilderness where it has been so very hard to look for that cloud by day and fire by night and it would be false to say that many times I've felt as if the Great Jehovah was not there and that He had long grown weary of my prayers. I am the faithless man who prayers and often feels as if I'm hurling empty words into the sky. And I've walked countless miles, physically, mentally, and spiritually, in what F. Scott Fitzgerald so eloquently described as the dark night of the soul and have woken the next morning ashamed that I fell asleep and still no answer has been arrived at, but I've not quit praying and hurling those words into the great night sky, but all I've prayed is wrong, but Jesus the Christ has translated my words well. In the words of the author of Streams in the Desert, I've piled high onto Jehovah and Jehovah has answered my prayers in a fashion that I would had asked them if only I knew past, present, and future and was in all things and the maker of all things, but I am far from that.

   So….where does all of this lead us. It is a very long attempt to say that there will be future posts about all the things that make up my life. I hope you'll continue to read them. I hope that my life continues to allow me to post. Be on the look out. They are coming and I can't wait to publish them. And as always I can not say thank you enough for taking some minutes out of your day to read what little I have to say.

DAVID

“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 and lie down 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 with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” --Wendell Berry