Rabid Fun

I Remember The Squat Ugly Yellow Dog Joke

07/26/2010

Sunday, July 25, 2010

During a dry season in 1898 at Roberts Lakes in south Florida, 10,000 alligators gathered in the shallow water. When hide hunters began firing their rifles, “the shooting caused the alligators to stampede like cattle”.

Historian James Hammond, author of Florida’s Vanishing Trail, said, ““Explorers in the 1700s report thousands of alligators and crocodiles filling every river and stream on Florida’s east coast. These hungry predators line the shores awaiting their abundant prey. The annual mullet run brings great swarms of fish literally swimming into their open jaws, and turning peaceful tributaries into ‘pots of boiling water’ rising 25 feet in the air”.

Last week the Clinch County News displayed a video of a gator feeding frenzy at http://www.theclinchcountynews.com/v2/content.aspx?ID=23750&MemberID=1340 .

Here’s a still picture from that video which was filmed July 11th:

Ginny and I found this video of particular interest because on the last day of our summer vacation earlier this month, we planned for a fall vacation. And Stephen C. Foster Georgia State Park on the Suwannee River (where the video was made) was on our short-list of places to go for a week to celebrate our 42nd Anniversary.

It has cabins available, it’s within a hundred miles of home (my arthritis makes that my outside limit for sitting in a car), and it has access to the beautiful Suwannee River.

Last year we rented a cabin at Lafayette Blue Springs, a Florida state park about ten miles southwest of Luraville, where we swam in the Suwannee. I posted photos of that trip on November 16, 2009, in my archives on the sidebar.

We had such a good time that this year, God willing, we wanted s similar experience.

We chose another park for this year but Stephen C. Foster was a close second—but with this video of the feeding frenzy I don’t think we’ll be too anxious to swim in the Suwannee again.

When I forwarded this video to my eldest daughter, she reminisced about a family picnic, saying, “YIKES, Dad! I am so glad I was not in either of those boats! Remember when we swam across the Suwannee to look at the fossils in the limestone/rocks? That is one of my found memories of childhood just me and you exploring the rocks… I’m sure glad it wasn’t us, and a gator and swimming!! I love you Dad! Have a great weekend!

Once, when he was a teenager, Johnny, my middle son, and I, went of a weekend canoeing trip down the Suwannee with his church youth group. A bus took us someplace on the upper Suwannee where the group slept on the floor of a host church.

As a shining Christian example to the young people, I presented a devotional to the kids around a campfire that night.

The next day we put canoes in the river and floated down stream all day stopping to swim and explore as the current and the spirit moved us. Johnny and I had a great time splashing care free in the river.

Far downstream at the end of the day we all put ashore at a wooden dock where the bus was to met us. I stepped on a rotten plank which gave way, dropping my leg through the dock and barking my shin from ankle to kneecap. I said some words which had not been included in the previous evening’s devotions.

Stop your ears, tender young people! Stop your ears!

Say, speaking of young people, wantta hear a great joke? One from my Boy Scout days? From 60 years ago when I was young myself?

There was this guy who owned a pit bull dog named Cuppie, best fighter in the land.

He would walk his pit bull in the park and turn it loose on other people’s dogs and laugh to see his Cuppie tear the weaker dogs up.

One day he meets this man walking a squat, ugly yellow dog on a lease. The bully boasts, “My Cuppie can beat any dog. I’ll bet you ten dollars he can take that squat, ugly yellow wimp of yours”.

Cuppie rushed in for the kill.

Chomp! Chomp. The squat ugly yellow dog eats Cuppie up.

“Say! What the Hell kind of dog is that,” the outraged bully cries.

“Well, before I cut his tail off and painted him yellow, he was an alligator”.

Reading, Working, Aching, Thinking About Love

07/24/2010

Saturday, July 24, 2010

This week I finished reading the 700 pages of The Winds Of Marble Arch, by Connie Willis, and two short books by Kurt Vonnegett: God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and Armageddon In Retrospect.

All these short stories make me want to jump in and write more…

However, I can’t seem to get a handle on that Cracker western I’ve been nosing around. I find I have a string of historical incidents but no central story. I’m trying to synthesize historical events, while avoiding anachronisms, into an overall plot set between 1829 and 1860 here in northeast Florida. But without the central plot all I have are supporting events and isolated happenings—Indian massacres, renegade attacks, a burning riverboat, a public hanging, a godly circuit rider, the technology of a 19^th Century itinerate photographer, and happenings in a historic Cowford whore house which also served as a bank.

The Cow Ford was the early name of Jacksonville before the city’s name was changed in 1829. The old doggerel went:

Start a cow thief where you will,
He’ll wind his way to Jacksonville.

While wallowing over the plotting of this novel, I’ve also caught up mostly on my yard work. I’d let our garden go to pot recently. You could film a Tarzan movie out there.

I get some of my best thinking and praying done while doing mundane hands-on chores. So I patched that hole the mirror burned in the laundry room wall.

I pruned.

I mowed.

I edged.

I ache!

Sitting on my ass reading for days on end then engaging hard physical labor aggravated my arthritis something fierce. Today I’m hobbling around the house on my cane. I should know better!

But I never seem to learn that lesson.

I do this every month.

I pay the price every month.

I live in pain a few days swearing, “Never Again” then I do the same thing the next time.

Yard work resembles sin in that respect.

Twice as I worked people I know saw me outside working and came by the house to unburden themselves about severe problems—truly, life or death matters.

Yard work resembles sin in that respect too.

Here I am sweating like a pig, filthy with grass clippings and spider webs in my hair. Unshaven. Hot. Irritable. Thirsty. Preoccupied. Hurting—and here comes a poor lost soul with a need seeking Christ and His succor.

And they show up at my door step just at the time I’m hurrying to get finished with yard work so I can go in, shower, cool off, and browse porno sites on the internet!

The very time when I am least prepared to say a word as a Christian witness is the very time I’m called upon to do so.

When I am feeling least compassion, is when I bump into someone who needs compassion most. When I am down and discouraged, bottoming out in the pits, here comes someone needing uplifting and encouraging.

The old saying says, A Christian needs to be ready to preach, pray or die at a moment’s notice.

For me, that notice comes, that hurt person shows up, my witness and comfort is called for when I am least prepared for it.

That’s the moment God sends someone into my life who needs my help.

And all I can do is listen.

And here is the kicker—all morning long as I raked and chopped weeds and picked up fallen branches, I’ve been thinking about the nature of love.

Romantic love between Ginny and me, love of family, love of neighbors, of enemies, of nation, of God.

The cardinal Christian virtue is love, yet I do not know how to be a loving man.

All I could do was listen to my visitors’ woes and commensurate—don’t happen to have $6,000 to solve one girl’s problem—and I hate to mouth “I’ll pray for you” in the face of someone’s real physical need.

That sounds so hollow, as though I’m some superior spiritual giant praying to the little people. So I avoid ever telling anyone I’ll pray for them; I just do it and keep my mouth shut about it. They don’t need to know what I’m doing. Only God does.

This morning I intended to write up my deep thoughts and conclusions on the nature of love.

Haven’t figured out my own conclusions yet.

If I ever learn anything about love for God or man, I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, I still have the jungle path yet to clear.

Tarzan swings from the kudzu vines in the wayback.

Love is …

07/22/2010

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

We show love in various ways.

For instance, a week or so ago, Ginny brought home a bouquet of flowers for me to enjoy.

Odd for a lady to give her husband flowers?

Not for us, it isn’t.

For the birthday party Saturday, she baked a separate cake for me, one without any icing because I don’t like icing; and she baked one with icing for everybody else.

Sometimes, little mundane actions speak louder than romantic, candlelight dinners and black lace negligees—although those are fun too!

Yesterday, out of love for Ginny, I drove 60 miles and visited six or eight stores looking for her brand of cigarettes. The stores where she usually buys them here in Jacksonville have stopped stocking her brand (and the Publix managers get snotty when I asked them to special order her kind—just see if I ever buy anything from one of those stores again).

However, by diligently searching yesterday, I discovered a store in Kingsland, Georgia, about 35 miles north of here, where they carry her brand.

While in Kingsland, I also chanced upon a book store I’d never visited before, The Book Cellar. As soon as I walked in the door, Sophie, the cat who owns the store, greeted me by jumping down from a top shelf and streaking toward the back.

Within minutes, Darlina, Sophie’s human servant, helped me find a Florida history book missing from my collection. And the price was indeed affordable. Later, I told Ginny about this store and we plan to visit there to spend some time soon.

Oh, the Book Cellar’s website, with more photos of Sophie, is at http://darlinasbookcellar.com/default.aspx

On my drive home along U.S.17 over miles of salt marshes at low tide, I felt overwhelmingly thankful at the goodness of the Lord Christ in letting me accomplish everything I’d scheduled for the day—that rarely happens.

Looking at the marsh teeming with living creatures of all descriptions, I admired the handiwork of God in creating with such imagination and variety. Repetition with constant variation. We are privileged to worship this High and Holy One Who holds all the created universe in the hollow of His nail-scared hand and Who yet considers our low estate.

For our devotions after dinner (a second breakfast actually, we had sausage, eggs and grits) Ginny and I read a parable which made no sense to us at all. Then we watched a video movie she likes—must be episode 3,892 of Monarch Of The Glen—till bedtime.

Hunting through strange stores, watching Scottish soap operas, of such things love is.

Crushed Grapes

07/20/2010

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Ginny and I observed a lot of life going on around us during our stay-at-home vacation:

Hummingbirds—a family of hummingbirds began visiting our flowers. Starting with the mimosa tree and working their way to lantana, cigar plants and impatiens, the birds established a regular pattern of daily rounds—that’s what saved our house from burning down.

Small House Fire—For 15 years a mirror has hung on a wooden wall outside the laundry room. One day last week as I sat outside reading while waiting for the hummingbirds to appear, I smelled something burning. A neighbor burning trash, I thought and went back to my Connie Willis book. Every now and then, .I’d glance up to see if the hummingbirds were there yet.

I saw smoke rising above the roof of our house. I ran to that side and saw a hole about the size of a dinner plate in the wall flaming as smoke curled upward. I saw electric wires inside the hole.

I called the fire department and explained to the dispatcher that I had a small fire I’d like a fireman to check out…

Here comes, sirens blaring, five fire units: a pumper truck, a hook and ladder truck, a fire chief’s car, a police cruiser, and an ambulance!

One fireman hosed down the flames, another used a pike to pull wooden siding away from the wall, another used a reciprocal saw to enlarge the hole, an officer used a thermal imaging camera to see inside the wall to detect hotspots…And while those four put out the fire, another six or eight firemen stood around admiring a mechanical barking dog I have at the back door; they’d never seen one of these before. It fascinated them.

Remember burning leaves with a magnifying glass when you were a kid? Well, the heat index was 105 that day and apparently my mirror focused a ray of direct sunlight on the wooden siding of our laundry room. It burned through the T-11 siding and the insulation and into the studs and beams of the laundry room wall.

Had I not been outside at just the right moment watching for the hummingbirds, the whole place might well have burned down.

Thank God I’m interested in bird watching.

Two Acts Of Kindness—Ginny and I went to a Sam’s Club, a huge warehouse store which is supposed to be cheaper than other stores. You offset the lower prices by paying for a membership card. This being our first visit, we did not have such a card.

When Ginny went to buy a carton of cigarettes, the casher turned her away and sent her to a long, long line at the customer service desk to buy a membership.

A young woman approached us asking if the carton of cigarettes was all we intended to buy. She offered to use her own pass card to buy the cigarettes if Ginny gave her the cash.

Turns out that the lady was just passing through Jacksonville, driving south from Tennessee and happened to exit the Interstate to buy gas. She’d seen our confusion in negotiating with that first casher and took pity on us just out of the goodness of her heart.

I told her that I’d write about her in my blog someday.

Later, in the Sam’s parking lot as I leaned against our car, I observed another act of kindness: a lady came out of the store pushing an old woman in a wheelchair and pulling a loaded cart of groceries.

A man at the entrance offered to help her and she refused. “I can manage,” she said.

A teenage boy said, “Lady, I can help you with that”.

Again, she said, “I can manage” and began pushing her awkward .train across the parking lot.

A third man walked up and began pushing her grocery cart. She let go and accepted his help.

Two guys had offered but the third guy just latched onto the loaded cart and started pushing—there’s some lesson for me here.

Up The Stairs—Ginny and I visited the 1870 lighthouse museum in St. Augustine. The tower is 165 feet tall. There are 219 steps to the observation deck, including the granite steps leading up to the metal stairs. The observation deck is the height of a fourteen-story building.

Here’s a photo of Ginny at the bottom….

There will be no photo of any Cowart at the top…

just climbing the ten steps leading into the museum proved all I could manage… Must be getting old.

Getting Older—Four members of our family have July birthdays: Helen, Donald, Ginny, and me. To celebrate, our friend Barbara White invited a dozen of us to her home for a cookout.

I asked Barbara if she would present a devotional thought for us at the party and she gave a meditation of Isaiah 65:8, a passage that pictures people and the events of our lives as a cluster of grapes, bruised, squished, crushed…

Barbara told of some things going on in her life at the moment, her cancer and chemotherapy, her granddaughter’s considering an abortion, financial decisions, a feeling of dryness and emptiness in her own spiritual life.

Events like grapes in a cluster of days in our lives, bruised and battered by sin and circumstance.

Yet, the Prophet Isaiah said that the Lord will not destroy the bruised grapes because there is some juice left in the smushed cluster—some little bit of juice, enough for God to use to create something new.

No matter how old you get, no matter what you have done, no matter how bruised and battered you are, God does not utterly destroy you. He can still make —a new wine.

It Is What It Is

07/01/2010

Thursday, July 1, 2010
Yesterday my friend Barbara began another round of chemotherapy. Her cancer has returned. We’d talked about this possibility over lunch Monday; and she was still in the doctor’s office when I called her to ask the verdict;.

“It is what it is,” she said resigned to what God has next for her.

Yesterday also my friend Wes told me about the death of a friend of his over the weekend. AIDS. The young man, who lived in California, just got married in February not expecting the flare up of his disease so soon.

It is what it is.

Wes just returned from a conference on Christian apologetics, a course in reasons for our faith. We talked about families and faith for about five hours.

I wonder how you measure faith?

I believe less and less stuff as I grow older, yet I’m more and more confident about the few things I do still believe.

My faith boils down to a confidence that Jesus is the Son of God who deliberately chose to come into this world as a human being to save sinners so we could see in living color, so to speak, what God is like.

We saw what God is like and we didn’t like it.

We crowned him with spiky thorns, scourged Him, nailed Him to a cross and gouged a hole in His side out of pure spite.

But because He is the source of all life, He retained life in Himself and rose from the grave to return to where He came from—for a time. I believe that He would kind of like for us to behave ourselves till He returns.

I believe religion is all about Him, not about us—especially not about me—and that I show my devotion to Him by the way I treat other people, starting with my wife, my children, my friends, my neighbors, and the stranger I chance to meet while buying tires for my car.

That just about sums up my faith, except for a few cultural scruples such as taking my hat off when talking to a lady and being kind to my dog. But scruples are not faith.

In other news, as today is the first day of July, I posted a new Free E-Book on my blog sidebar. The link is beneath that picture of the librarian on the ladder. I have him  getting hit by lightening to show it’s an electronic book.

Isn’t that clever?

Click on the sidebar and check it out.

My Free E-Book for July is A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad: John Cowart’s 2005 Diary. I’ve kept some kind of diary off and on since I was a teenager and some of those old entries are just as interesting as the one you are reading now…Er, maybe that’s not much of an enticement to read the first book in my Dirty Old Man series, but it cost nothing so please check it out.

It is what it is.

One last bit of news: Ginny is taking some time off work over the 4^th Of July holiday. We can’t afford to go off anywhere on vacation… What the heck, we can’t afford to stay here either, but we’re going to.

Therefore, I do not plan to make any more blog postings for about ten days. While I’m off carousing in wild living, you may want to drop in on my e-friend Tracy’s blog at http://abundantliving-tracy.blogspot.com/ .I find her testimony today particularly helpful.

I will lead the blind by ways they have not known,
Along unfamiliar paths I will guide them;
I will turn the darkness into light before them
and make the rough places smooth.
These are the things I will do;
I will not forsake them.
Isaiah 42:16

And These Are The Generations…

06/30/2010

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

And These Are The Generations Of…

I have not written about what I’ve been doing recently because I haven’t been doing anything. My life has been a dull slogging along doing historical research for that western novel I’m working on.

No spiritual highs or lows, just slogging.

However, look at this:

Yes, I’ve had fun playing with the internet discovering several sites for fun. The above epithet, I made at Tombstone Generator at http://www.jjchandler.com/tombstone/ .

Isn’t that fun!

And last night Ginny and I sat for four hours listening to the music of our youth on Pandora Radio at http://www.pandora.com/#/about . This great site allows listeners to chose their own play list and it plays the songs you chose. So we listened to the Beach Boys, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Kingston Trio, the Everly Brothers, the Mamas & The Pappas, Credence Clearwater Revival, and a bunch of other favorite groups.

This was the first time in ages we have done nothing but grove to “our” music.

Great fun!

Oh, by the way, that Tombstone Generator site also links to one where you can create various warning signs—such as:

Glog: A Dinosaur Novel Of Sorts is my favorite of all the books I’ve written or edited.

Speaking of writing, four years ago today, I posted the following newspaper article in my diary under the heading: (click to enlarge the article):

America’s Two Greatest Writers

06/30/2006

This newspaper clipping is fake but fun.

I used Newspaper generator at http://tools.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp to create it.

I did it because Stephen King is my favorite writer and I just finished re-reading his book Desperation, yesterday. I think it ranks among his finest.

If I tried to list my favorite Stephen King books, I’d include about 30 of his 40+ novels. And, as a writer, I find his non-fiction, On Writing and Danse Macabre inspiring.

Reading his books, I admire his skill in removing me from my world and getting me totally involved in his. I marvel at his command of English and at his thought processes as he takes ordinary people and places them in extraordinary situations.

Since I read Carrie when it first came out, I’ve bought two shelves full of Stephen King books. Obviously, Mr. King has never bought one of my books but if he reads this fake clipping, I hope he gets a kick out of it.

And The Winner Is….

06/26/2010

Saturday, June 26, 2010

And The Winner Is….

Ginny!

Back in May, Ginny’s employer announced she won an award for excellent performance and that she would be honored at an awards banquet.

Yesterday the official photo of that ceremony came through. Here is Ginny flanked by two of the Big Bosses:

In part Ginny’s citation says—“Congratulations on your outstanding service… We would like to publicly recognize your achievement…The Awards Committee thanks you for the outstanding contribution you make…

“Ms Cowart exceeds internal customer service by assisting with multiple programs…She creates reports that enable each program to track success beyond the normal criteria, all with a positive attitude… She worked on this project on her own initiative and …”

Hey, people, I saw the report the letter mentions, that thing was over a foot thick!

They should give her an award just for being able to lift the thing—much less compile and write it!

I’m proud of my kind, beautiful, intelligent, and gracious wife. She delights me.

And her testimony shines.

Years ago one of her former bosses buttonholed me at an office party and said, “Mr. Cowart, Virginia doesn’t have religious signs around her office. She hardly ever says anything and she doesn’t even wears a cross necklace—but nobody can walk into our office for five minutes without knowing she’s a Christian lady”.

Yes, I have married a winner.

And guess what?

When she came home Thursday, Ginny brought a bouquet of flowers for me:

So I guess I’m a winner too.

But, alas, we can’t all be winners.

Case in point:

Yesterday’s Times-Union newspaper reported on the 52nd annual Big Rock Blue Marlin Fishing Tournament held last week in Morehead City, North Carolina.

The prize offered for the biggest blue marlin caught was just under one million dollars.

Peter Martin Wann, 22, of Alexandria, Virginia, aboard the good ship Citation hooked an 883-pound blue marlin, the biggest fish ever landed in the tournament.

Happy. Happy. Happy.

Or not.

On weigh-in at the dock, tournament officials discovered that Peter Martin Wann came from another state and he had not bothered to buy Coastal Recreational Fishing License, which is required by North Carolina law. The license costs ten dollars ($10).

This disqualified Wann’s fish.

The $912,825 in prize money went to another fisherman on another boat. Thus the crew of Carnivore won first with their 528.3 pound blue marlin and the crew of Wet-N-Wild won second place with their 460 pound blue marlin.

And, to top it off, officials of the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries fined Peter Martin Wann $160 for fishing without a license.

Playing Dolls

06/25/2010

Friday, June 25, 2010

Two of these birds are different from the others:

Jennifer, my eldest daughter who is well over 30, collects solid perfume compacts. These are tiny jeweled perfume containers shaped like animals, buildings, fish, birds, etc.

She tells me they are not perfume bottles; that’s something different.

Jennifer is entering a photo contest open to people who collect these trinkets and wish to display their collections. She came over Thursday asking my help taking photos of her solids. So I spent the day playing dolls with my little girl.

Here are some of her solids on a checker board:

Incidentally, if you have a compact perfume solid that you’d like to trade or sell cheap, please e-mail me and I’ll put you in contact with Jennifer.

We made some photos, like this butterfly, outside in natural settings:

I used the backdrop of a brick wall and an old well for these:

Here are jeweled turtles sunning on a log:

Inside, we arranged some displays, such as this Christmas tree and the Indian girl, on the kitchen table:

Lighting proved a problem with these two photos of Stonehenge when we use a computer screen in the background:

By placing Jennifer’s compacts directly on the screen, and not using a camera flash, but by shining a flashlight on the compacts, we got a little better result:

Altogether we made over a hundred photographs. And all the while we worked, my daughter happily told me all about each compact, where she got it, how she corresponded with other collectors, how she has made friends as she bought, sold and traded these things—she even know the names of other collector’s dogs!

Ginny has a sister and five brothers, and once Ginny’s Dad told me that a father has two duties toward his children: to make them happy, and to make them miserable.

He was a wise man.

It’s been a long time since I played dolls with one of my little girls, but today I think I made this one daughter happy.

My New Shirt

06/24/2010

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Last night Eve, my middle daughter, a librarian, brought me a new tee shirt, one that advertises a local book store. Here’s a photo of Eve:

And, here’s a photo of me wearing the new shirt:

The quote from Erasmus says, “When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left I buy food and clothes”.

On the shelf behind me are some of the books I’ve published and a coffee mug given to me by Donald, my youngest son—the logo on the coffee mug is for Bluefish Books, our family’s publishing house.

On the back of the shirt Eve gave me is the slogan of Chamblin’s Book Mine, the area’s largest used book store. It announces that Chamblin’s is the place to search for “New, Used, Rare, Out-of-Print, and Non-Existent Books”.

Chamblin’s boasts of having over one million fine–quality books on the shelves for sale. Know how you can tell they’re fine-quality?

Because they don’t stock a single book I wrote.

For ages, Ginny and I, (and now our grown children) have shopped there all the time—unless we’re out buying food or clothes.

A Cloud Without Rain

06/23/2010

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

This morning’s Daily Mail newspaper carries a photo of an odd cloud seen over Perthshire this weekend.

Brian Wilton, who took the photograph, said the cloud was an altocumulus lenticularis—an almond-shaped or lens-shaped mass of cloud that appears dense but quickly evaporates.

“We couldn’t believe it,” said Mr Wilson. “It was like the scene in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the spaceship comes down.”

I’ve never seen a cloud shaped like that one, but clouds have played a big part in my life recently.

As Ginny and I droved home from the library last night, we noticed how clean our city looks. Heavy afternoon showers over the past couple of days scoured grime from buildings and streets. The rains washed away the yellow oak pollen which dusted tree leaves a week ago. Pollution has been washed from the air.

Old men surrounded by kibitzers play chess on the benches in Hemming Park. The joggers and the jigglers run on the sidewalks seeking health, youth or something—most likely each other. Sailboats cruise on the river. Seagulls soar above. Motorcyclists, ignoring helmet laws in the early summer evening spurt away from traffic lights

Jacksonville sparkles.

That’s my external world.

Internally, things are not so squeaky clean.

I feel like a dark cloud—black around the edges but containing no cleansing, life-giving rain. More like a dust cloud than a rain cloud.

King Solomon said, “Like a billowing cloud that bring no rain is the person who talks big but never produces”. (That’s Proverbs 25:14 from The Message).  The Authorized Version renders that same verse as, “Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain”.

Those words describe me.

The last four projects I have undertaken produced nothing tangible. Lots or work; wasted time; never producing.

I wonder why I bother.

The game’s not worth the candle.

I hear other Christians glorying in the triumphant Christian life… I strongly suspect they lie. But, maybe not. Perhaps the blessings of God are meant for other people.

Not me.

Perhaps God grades success and failure on some other scale, one I am not aware of.

But even my prayers recently bog down in murk; Like the Prophet Jeremiah, I say, “Lord, Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through”.

I’ve heard that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting some different result.

That’s what I do.

Yet, King Solomon also said, “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all”.

The Message, a modern speech translation, renders that same verse as:

Don’t sit there watching the wind. Do your own work.

Don’t stare at the clouds. Get on with your life.

Just as you’ll never understand the mystery of life forming in a pregnant woman,

So you’ll never understand the mystery at work in all that God does.

So, even though I feel like a dust cloud producing nothing, even though my prayers bog down in murk, even though my work seems a waste of time, I keep slogging ahead doing the same thing expecting a better result.

The Psalmist prayed, “Lord, Thy mercy is great above the Heavens: and Thy truth reaches even into the clouds”.

Back in the ‘60s when Ginny and I were courting, a Viet Nam era folksong played often on the radio; sorry, I don’t remember the singer’s name, and I can only recall snatches of the lyrics—the song was about clouds and the last line said something like:

It’s clouds’ illusions I recall; I really don’t know clouds at all.