Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast held in sin and nature’s night
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light
My chains fell off, my heart was free
I rose went forth, and followed thee…

30 years ago today I was arrested and began to be free.

Soli Deo Gloria.

and I’m thinking about my brother now gone from this world, can it be, for nearly four years? The little boy who shared a room with me. The handsome football captain. The father. The friend. The smile and a thousand images still inside me.

What I see in bread and wine transformed he sees face to face. What I envision only with the eyes of faith is as tangible to him as the recliner on which I am sitting. I know someone, not simply a Saint from times past but someone who breathed my air, who has seen Jesus, who sees Him as routinely as I see the people at work. Someone who lives in unclouded communion. Someone with no sleepless nights, in fact no night at all.

Time rushes on. The world is crazier than usual these days. People’s hearts, my heart, can grow faint. I wonder, in my own selfish way, why God is waiting even as I understand that time is mercy for both me and the world. Yet what must it be like to rest, not for a few fleeting hours but beyond time, beyond care, beyond everything that claws at us even as we seek to ascend?

For now I am here in time. I bear its marks. I seek as best I can to redeem the moments I have been given. There is joy here. There is love here. There is happiness here. Yet how wonderful it must be to know these things with undimmed perception, in whole and not in part!

Some day. Until then my times are in God’s hands.

looking back at me in the mirror these days. Lines under his eyes, speckles of gray, a bit worn on the edges. I’m not sure what to do with him yet.

I’ve always wondered how people grow old. The only thing I’ve figured out is that is happens slowly for the most part, so gradual that it misses perception. You simply get used to your face and your body and hardly notice what’s going on until you go to a high school reunion or have your friends post pictures of their grandchildren on Facebook. Then you pay attention.  “Dang, I’m old, what the heck happened?”

I suppose everyone thinks they’re immune from wear and gravity when it comes to themselves. Other people get old, for sure, but me I’m simply not one of them. It may be a blessing or a curse that we don’t always get to see our face, only others. We don’t have to notice what they notice or see how time is working its art on us.  Plausible deniability.

The truth is that I’m not upset about it all. I’m really more curious. Part of me would like my 18 year old body back but most of me enjoys being immune from its testosterone induced terrors. I watch the changes from the perspective of one who has experienced the richness of time. I know things now and so the face in the mirror isn’t so horrible as I might have thought it would be when I was 20. The world is moving on and my body is marking the passing.

I think, if the truth is told, that I will enjoy being old except for the very last part of it. The whole idea of laying in a bed and struggling for breath doesn’t appeal to me but I understand its the last task I must accomplish. I’m on my way home you know and it seems we all have to leave as we came, weak, vulnerable, but full of potential. So I’ll cross that river when I come to it.

Yet I will enjoy the quiet, the setting sun, the preciousness of each day ahead.  No face lifts, please, I want the embalmer to have to work for my money, and I have resolved to let the rest of the string spool out as it will, God being my hope.

by the sights and the sounds and the million images a minute that flow in, through, and around me, even, it seems, when I sleep. I am an organic creature in an electric world. I was created from earth but I live on cement. I was made to walk in the sun but I am often little more than the soft guts of a machine.

I have reached my capacity and still push comes to shove. I remember simplicity but only through a digital haze. I am a person trying not to be a product, a soul trying to avoid the status of commodity. I am slated to be emptied and recycled like a tin can with eyes, an old car when the heartbeat fails or a new one comes along.

Yet I resist. Even the anxiety of the world is a kind of resistance, the sense of a sea of humanity holding on to something higher even as they are being marched to the ovens. Something higher, something better flashes in and out of our consciousness and it will not go away even as our masters say “Move along, there’s nothing to see here.”

Jesus is resistance to everything inhuman within and without. When they come to stamp my forehead it is His life that will say “no”. When they ask me to die in their wars. When they call on me to spend my money to pay for my own imprisonment. When they show me the kingdoms of this world and say this is desirable.  I will refuse because I have seen the Light beyond darkness and have nowhere else to go but there.

Maranatha.

I had the opportunity to see the gravesite of Memphis Minnie, an acclaimed blueswoman of the past century. In her life she was acclaimed but in death there wasn’t even a marker until a charity group founded by musicians, and particularly Bonnie Raitt, bought a stone. Even with the stone the grave looks bare, too close to the highway, alone and kind of forlorn.

The truth is that every one of us, except for the rarest few, will disappear from the world just a few years after we die. We are all destined to be a Memphis Minnie in our own way.  The only One who cares is the only One who cared for us with complete purity and integrity when we were alive. That’s worth remembering.