Au Revoir, Entanglements
(Goodbye)
"The world had
absorbed the Church, and the church is content that it should be so!
Horatius Bonar
One of the affects of aging, you
know that you are going to say good bye, Au Revoir. You know you are going to
say goodbye even though you used botanical medicines to escape the poisons of
modern medicines and the chemicals of Big Pharma. But, as was said by one of
the preachers at my own father's funeral, "You just wear out."
Most of us live on an island of dissociative
fugue (Fugue usually involves daydreaming, travel, even establishing a new
identity). Most of us are on stage, pretending to be someone else, most of our
lives, giving the minimal yet trying to get the maximum. I often feel that I
have struggled on my own towards an ocean's shore after battering the waves of
trials and turmoil, almost drowning with the despair of living.
Those of us living are accosted by
the boxes of financial, political, even spiritual hype, when there is no longer
anything in the boxes.
As a young boy, I would often
observe the despair in the eyes of our farm livestock... the sweating,
overworked mules, the milk cow. Then I would look at the eyes of my sweating,
overworked parents and grandparents. What kept them going? Was it a matter of
reason, or faith, or just survival? Did people really believe what people in
our country church THOUGHT they believed? I SO remember our Pastor, M.L.
Johnson, standing in the church yard smoking cigarettes... deacons and other
men of the church smoking cigarettes and I thought, will there be smoking in
heaven?
There is no doubt in my mind that
I was chosen, elected of God. It has taken an entire lifetime for my or your
redemption to gel in my mind. Faith is 90% courage and I have had the
courage to test my faith. I know that God wanted me to travel the world and he
made the necessary arrangements. When I saw the Hindu Temples at Khajuraho,
Buddhist monkey temples in Nepal ,
Islamic Mosques across North Africa ... the warp
and woof of humanity seeking a power greater than themselves. I knew why David Livingston-Africa,
Hudson Taylor-China and other Christian missionaries across the world had the passion
to proclaim the Christ whom we loved. I did not understand eternal security,
the security we all seek in life as well as death, until I saw a father walk
down the street holding on to the arm of his young son. The French Philosopher,
Blaise Pascal said, "Make people believe that the Gospel is true and then
show them that it is." Life is more
than the eventual disappearance than your eventual disappearance into open
ground (grave). We have found that lives are a symphony of personalities... no
matter where, no matter when, that the individual is not a solitary shooting
star. Don't try to hide it, parts of your body can be transplanted, but your
soul is a mystery within yourself. Your mind is always factoring the equations
of living. Like my parents, you may be working to hard to get sick, or take
vacations, or holidays. Many of us have never had time for the pleasures that
many enjoy... hitting a small white ball, shooting at animals in their home
place. Even enjoying the pleasures of fishing, which simply must be treasured
because our blessed Lord enjoyed fish and picked his friends among fisherman. Some
of us just enjoy learning for learning sake. But, in the quietness of the night,
every time we hear the siren of an EMS ambulance,
drive past a graveyard, we know that death awaits us as it has awaited everyone
else before us, the mortality rate is still 100%.
One of my best friends was a black physician. His father, a
well known black preacher, died and I attended the funeral. The funeral was
held in a very large black church, the largest in the city. To this day, my own
paternal grandmother's funeral was the largest I have ever attended, I was age
7. Perhaps this is the last great homage we can extend to our loved ones. At
this black preacher's funeral, I had never heard such coral music, the pallbearers
wearing white gloves, nurses in white uniforms attending to families. At the
end, the casket carried quite a distance to the hearse while the carillon pealed
a mournful dirge.
God is "Boss", he is in control of everything. He
knows about the hungry children of refugees, the desperate lives of Christians
living in the concentration camps of North Korea (These matters, a
burden on my heart every day of my life, in my prayers). There are so many
things my sighted eyes saw, my blind eyes remember, that I wish to forget. I
will never forget the refugees lined up at a boarder crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan ... those desperate people
with their worldly goods in sacks on their backs, their children in rags
barefoot on the icy ground. I have not forgotten the city of Manila ,
in the Philippines , where
desperate people searched through great piles of garbage (Not far from the Philippines University
But, Christianity is not a checklist, you do this-you don't
do that. In my lifetime, I feel I have been catapulted into Ripley's radio
program which came on when I was a child, Believe
It or Not. I would never have believed that churches would accept the
killing of babies, same sex marriage. Life intensity-obedient trance, the
strangulation of all absolutes via eyesight and the television set.
"He understands
you longing, Your deepest grief He shares; Then let Him bear your burden, He
understands, and cares."
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