My boy wants a beard

Tonight I get to draw a beard on my 8 year old. It's very important that he be an engineer and have a manly beard. It's key to the outfit for Trick-or-treating too because he doesn't really have a fantastic costume. We have to rely on good make-up.

Facial hair is a funny thing. When Nathan couldn't find the word for "mustache" in his language testing this summer, he used hand motions on his lip and said, "It's on a man's lip and it tickles." You can tell his daddy has a beard and mustache and gives kisses. Maybe that's why obtaining a beard is so important. Whatever it is, it helps get candy.

October madness

I've noticed lots of spooky things recently... decorations, clothing, pumpkins, people, surprising turns in conversations...

Our car got egged. I loved it because our car is 16 years old. It's a wonderful piece of junk car. It's beautiful to us because somehow it manages to still run. But it's about as ugly as cars get. The egg didn't really matter. The YOKE was on them really. HA!


It's been madness lately for several big reasons, and several small ones, and several odd ones, and one or two that should stop making my radar, but do.

Besides that, when it's the worst, the good news is, the (so-called) "worst" HAVE gotten less irritating ... practicing the presence of God DOES work.

Will "the madness" stop by Halloween?

hum...
I'll have only to wonder.

God's sufficiency

It seems my most fitful times are all rooted in doubts of God's sufficiency for me.

They often do not appear this way though. They might present as symptoms of just being too stressed out, wanting to pack up and leave, the feeling of losing faith in humanity, of just a proverbial "temper tantrum".

If I let God calm me down, it usually ends up with him sort of asking me some tough questions about where I am placing my trust.

hearing songs in the morning

Seismic forces may have their way

For a while -

So that, my heart quakes

Or my compunction like Tsunamis

Unfurl, or give away my strength,

And too, herald my weakness.


But, I hear your Song

On the open breeze.

Part howl, and crying

Part calling, my name and yours

Together.


Of home beyond the veil,

Making a thirst amid me

So rich and aching

That I sate

Even in aridity

Until your eschaton

A song for Rich Kilmer

Today Deb Perkins our church organist, and a talented musician, played a tribute on the piano to a lovely man Rich Kilmer. It was the Bach/Gounod of Ave Maria. This song is a prayer. For that reason, it is like life itself. There is a bitter sweetness to this piece that stirs my newly aquired compunction. Which I've learn is also what is known (historically) as a "gift of tears"... though I didn't realize it was anything close to a gift (and saw no real use for it until recently). When I am now stirred to compunction, in this case because of the immense beauty, frailty, pain, and reality and sharp, brevity of life and loss, I weep. And now that I am not jolted by those tears, I can be in those moments unencumbered, and enjoy the music; and also realize, though perhaps still with wet eyes, that God is very much in all of reality, in my world and the next one. Even so, in those moments also, "Jesus wept".

Like a prayer, we are like a breath. We come into this world, and there is beauty, and joy, and sadness, and sorrow, bitterness, goodness, vanity, excellence, and excess, dryness ... and then we are gone. The things we have done are then over. It is brief. Our friend Rich, dear Rich, and his sweet, smiling face, and his good nature are gone now, suddenly from us, and this life. And he passes to another.

It was so lovely and fitting of Deb to play a tribute.

To hear what I mean, listen to a rendition of the song on you-tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMdhEt7J31Y

See you soon, Rich.
We miss you already.