Hospice Red Flags
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Rapture Dream
In the dream I am younger, foolish, or maybe just in an alternate timeline. I am in college and for the first few weeks of the semester I keep missing a class because of some sort of social group attached to another class.
The repeated absences from the business economics class worry me, weigh on my mind, but I am actively choosing the warm, group project participation over a class I have registered for but have never attended. The idea of contacting the professor never enters my mind.
Finally, I decide I must go.
As I walk to the neglected business economics course, I see the group games people wrapping up a session. They are energized and talking to each other while I trudge off to face the uncomfortable unknown.
As I walk, I worry. Will I be able to catch up? What assignments have they completed? Will the professor have noticed I am missing? My concerns fill my mind.
Just outside the room, I can hear the professor tell the class to get out their graphing calculators—there is a test today!
I feel totally unprepared. No graphing calculator, I rifle through a bin to find scratch paper for a test as my heart sinks.
I walk into the room and approach the professor, who seems to know who I am despite my habitual truancy. I begin to try to explain myself—
“Hello, I am registered for this class…”
He cuts me off, sternly—
“Not as of today you are not.”
I am flooded with relief, but still worried. Do I need to confirm with the registrar that I have been dropped from the course? Will there be an academic penalty? Why have I paid for a course I did not attend?
Walking back, puzzling over the purloined business economics class, I see my fellow students engaging in a group activity.
They are arranging packaged snacks like sticky buns, coffee cakes, and Twinkies on folding tables so that an unseen cohort can sample them.
The contrast is stark. A minority group of students is facing a rigorous test, while most appear to be setting out and sampling junk food.
My last thought before the dream is over—
This is college? How strange.
Wish v. Pray
I wish there were a salve that I could pour out over the avenue pietà
Blown glass overflown with
Remedy made of light
An unspooling of the reckless myopia that led to the senseless tragedy
The beloved returned home
Wish.
V. Prayer—
The fragile vessel, the mind, the heart, the words spilled out to the God of Time and Propitiation
I don’t care if I don’t understand the words and can’t see the light
He will come back
Scoop up the Beloved
Call us Home
Washed Ashore
I have to have written about this before—
I once knew a young, smart-but-also-foolish lifeguard
Who strove to find meaning in a fortune cookie when he had
A relentless friend who constantly tried to get him to
Fall in love with Jesus.
I have been puzzling about how to tell the story of God made into a baby made into a man made into a sacrifice for the sins of the world broken for us, breaking open hell, coming back to life, giving us our lives back.
There.
Here—
Is the bottle, washed ashore for you
Open it
And once you know it is true, put it in another bottle and
Send it out to sea.
Here I am, Adonai
I know a man who is fighting to live in order to be there for his wife. His struggle, pain, and uncertainty are deeply courageous, but also scary.
When physics seems inexorable, then believing in the deus ex machina makes a person look pretty crazy..
But I am not talking about Aeschylus or even Plutarch, I am talking about Jesus.
He doesn’t need to save a weak plot with a contrived entrance, and he does very incisively predict his own return.
I want to “pray deeper.” I want to pray the way I swim, respirate, or walk up a hill.
I want to spend the time I have imploring God to do impossible things now and forever after.
I need to keep my eyes on Jesus. He is the God Who Saves.
57 Million People
A few years ago I began a friendship with someone who was experiencing early signs of memory loss. My friendship with this person has been defining because
They retain their intelligence and personality even as the memory loss has progressed.
They are still deeply human, and their soul and spirit are not limited by the memory loss.
They are well-looked after by amazing people, but life feels fragile and they express that fragility with both pathos and Grace.
I do not like the term dementia. It has a whiff of pejorative madness. I try to maintain the common use of the primary symptom—memory loss, because we need a better word for what happens when anyone loses memory because of the multiple reasons any person can lose their memory. There is not one cause, and there should be care taken about “lumping” 57 million people together.
Please pray for all of us—all the humans, but please consider praying specifically for the 57 million humans who have memory loss.
God loves us all and nothing can stop him from speaking to each of us—even if the words might seem to evanesce in the memory.
The soul of Man lives forever
And the Son of Man has promised he will
Keep that which we give to him against That Day—or as my friend would add—“on all the others as well.“
Discrimination Maze
Through the side door
I spent more than a few minutes trying to find the healthiest food choices in a gas station convenience store. It took some time and the eventual choices were the best I could do—pistachios, pretzels, Chex mix and two packs of chicken salad tins with crackers.
The cashier was very nice. He told me that I should dance, then told me that yesterday was “National Brown Liquor Day,” and that I should buy some liquor from the store and then buy a soda to “really be happy.”
I demurred.
Today I looked it up—
National Brown Liquor Day?
I don’t think so. But I should dance
Because God has given us the New Wine of the Holy Spirit.
On the good days, the bad days, and the days when the world feels food-deserty.
Jesus is here
Let’s dance!
Mixtape to Mars and the freckles in our eyes
I have long held the opinion that if a disheveled, crazed woman accosted you in the grocery store parking lot with a lottery ticket, you would probably still check the nightly numbers for a winner
I could be wrong but
Jesus is coming back soon and we don’t have
Time for trips to hostile planets or other vainglorious pursuits when it is enough to ask
What is on the mixtape Jesus has handed us
In the parking lot of this planet
Seconds before the end of
All remaining
“pretty girl discounts”
Matthew 6:9 Interlinear: thus therefore pray ye: ‘Our Father who art in the heavens! hallowed be Thy name.
Matthew 6:9 Interlinear: thus therefore pray ye: ‘Our Father who art in the heavens! hallowed be Thy name.
— Read on biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/6-9.htm
Carrying Light 