Scar Tissue and Cobwebs

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me (Psalm, 139, 7-10).

God has told me in no certain words that I am tough, that I have been a real problem to him. But, God knew how to deal with me, how to straighten me out. This alpha male could learn or memorize anything. I was not very kind to others. I had a very caustic tongue, always in a hurry. I had much to accomplish. It is the grace of God that I did not kill myself or someone else with my car. Always driving to fast and before the time of the bottomless ocean of technology and information, I did not have a recording machine, flying down the highway, I would be writing notes on the legal pad on the other seat... After my years of education and military service, often speaking somewhere two or three times a day.

I was editor of a professional journal and writing for several magazines. Plus handling all of my investments: real estate, stock market, etc. I look back now and cannot comprehend how I did it. Especially, and this is the most dangerous of all, I had lost the vision in one eye in the military and the other eye was rapidly fading.

Along the sun visor of my car, prescription glasses were lined up, a pair of glasses for anything. It got to the place that I could only drive where I could see white lines during the day, never at night. My most desperate minutes, minutes devoted entirely to conversations with God, were spent on the side of the highway after a rain shower... Waiting for the highway to dry enough that I could again see the white lines.

I will not go into the details of everything involving my life at this crucial time. Without saying, it was necessary to limit everything, give up my private practice, all social--church--fraternal--professional activities. God had slowed me down because I had been fortunate enough to prosper financially, had made big money on the stock market. He told me that he wanted me to sense the entire world, to study his creation.

It was in a small, clapboard church on the island of Samoa, Pacific Ocean, that one-woman missionary--preacher changed my life. I was staying at the famous Aggie Grey Hotel and one of the employees had walked me to the church, filled with natives. All were excited at their American visitor. The missionary walked down the aisle, and said to me "I am speaking from Psalm 84, blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them" (Psalm, 84:5). My life has never been the same since that time, when I had to learn that I must depend entirely on God... Nothing I can do, my strength is in him.

130 years ago, Henry David Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation. This writer, world traveler, has found that most people feel as they will get some sort of warning from God before their final seconds on earth. Most men who put on their socks in the morning do not realize that the undertaker may take them off that night.

God wanted me to sense the entire world, his creation (Dr. Morris has been on 8 around the world trips, traveled through every continent, passports stamped in 157 countries and trips to both the North and South Poles). My blindness has been my greatest blessing, which may seem strange to one living sightless, studying the world, leaning on God. BUT, I have truly learned why God is so long suffering toward his chief creation. People pretend about everything. Pretentions reign supreme... Much like the stage, the movie house, or puppets attached to strings. Concern is a lost word in most vocabularies. For instance, I learned that the most basic need in the world is water. Most of the world's population spends most of their lives (And they only have one life too) dealing with water. All over the world, women; the mothers of children spend their entire day looking for and bringing home water. At a time, when the greatest amount of money spent in the world is for destruction... Dropping explosives, making warriors and builders of war materials richer. Just a small amount of this money could put water in every village in the world.

Once, the Chief United Nations Executive of Africa invited myself and the President of Dusseldorf’s Medical School to have dinner with him (Tree tops in Africa, where Queen Elizabeth learned she had become the Monarch of England). I had been in the markets of so many poor African villages; I said to him "how much of the world's largess actually reaches the poverty stricken people who need it?" He said, "less than one percent because all of the funds from your nation and the world are siphoned off by corrupt African leaders". I ask you, is it much different in America, the world's most blessed, greatest power? Martin Luther saw this in 1521 even with the Catholic Church, high people wanting more money.

Read again the 84th psalm of David. Our lives are not mountain top experiences. We spend so much time in valleys, often weeping, often in pain, often asking the question, why me? To the God haters, the evolutionist, "Where do you turn, where do you go when knee deep in the mire of despondency, the valleys of life?" Your spiritual satirist, poking fun at people of faith will tell you to just take your sorrows like a man, to just die and become fertilizer. The Christian life is consumed by faith, plus nothing. By faith, often through "scar tissue" we can manage the "mud--holes" of disappointments in the very bottom of the valley. The Christian always keeps his eye on the goal, never pays much attention to the onlookers who are either cheering or booing him. His eye is on the goal, the mountaintop, NO not the mountain peak, but rather a lofty plateau from which he can reach down and in many ways encourage and help both the pretenders and deniers of the grace of God.


One killer bee will not cause death, but a swarm of killer bees probably will cause death. We worship and give praise to the Creator--God of the universe who designed the bees, as well as the scar tissue for every trial and problem, small or large.