#1966

Shade and Shadows

    The Hollow Men

    We are the hollow men

    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
    
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
    
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
    Remember us-if at all-not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.

-T.S.Eliot

            When you wear the amour of God (Ephesians 6:13), you have a testimony. You cannot retreat one inch. Satanic forces are so anxious to stab you in the back. Those of us with a testimony are not popular, even among associates/friends/neighbors, and especially family members. When you wear without apology/shame the whole amour of God, you must be prepared for the worst. It is going to get become more of a challenge for Christians. In a nation founded on Christian principles, the Int/over-paid bureaucrats/promising politicians actual believe that the Christian religion is just "superstition." They don't want to see Christianity outside of its place of worship. Since I was a child, I have always worn a Christian cross on my coat lapel. I want people to know whose side I'm on. I know (and real Christians know) that if unbelievers will actually kill the creator of the universe, the God-man Jesus (and there are thousands of martyrs who would give testimony of this fact) of whom the earth was not worthy (Hebrews 11:38), then we should not be greatly bothered if unbelievers (those who are not afraid of hell) despise us. The real Christian walks and talks under the blessings of the "all-seeing" eye of God. His protection is the mighty right hand of God (Isaiah 41:10).

            Your writer is 87 years of age, totally blind, but has wonderful memories of this present world. I still remember the comfort from shade trees. We had great oak trees around our house, where we retreated from the hot sun in the hot summertime. In my mind, I can still see our beautiful milk cows under the shade trees in the pasture, escaping the heat. In the horrors of today's highway traffic, pathologies for which we must take medication, in the warp and woof of every day living, it is so comfortable that we are provided with shade. For every persecution/trial/tribulation God always provides beauty/comfort/joy.

            This greatly blessed world-traveler, who has seen the bottomless ocean of technology birth and bloom during his lifetime, still feels the guilt/difference/exceptions from the shadows that bothered my ancestors. My mother and grandmothers made a fire in a wood stove before cooking any meal. They would think a microwave/toaster-oven/blender would be the greatest things in the world. Most of my ancestors never knew the thrill of having store-bought clothing...a sewing machine or type-writer/telephone... were technical miracles. In my boyhood, there were still spinning wheels, quilting frames, and everyone wore mended clothing. There were some rich people, even back then; but today, the poorest of the poor in this nation live better than kings and queens did 200 years ago. I still remember the shadows of death in every hospital room. My grandmother had breast cancer, and I can still hear her screams of pain in the hospital, the doctors of that time called it a carbuncle. So many small graves in the cemetery, because the shadow of death erased the lives of so many babies. This writers' first experience of death, in my memory is the image of a cheap casket in the hallway of a poor home. My parents never shielded me from anything. I remember my mother standing by that casket, looking at her dead friend who had died during child-birth. I remember my mother telling my father that the baby was wrapped in a blanket next to the mother.

            God made arrangements for me to travel the entire world (passport stamped in 157 countries, every continent). I saw the dead being cremated along the Ganges (India). I saw frozen bodies stacked like cordwood. Today's youth have no idea of the shadows that preceded their lives. Warfare has become so sanitized...it was difficult to kill a man with a sword or bayonet. Now, you just use a drone to drop a bomb and kill the innocent, without giving any consideration to the horrors left behind. I remember the first plastics. Plastic, now involved in everything we used, being a shade of comfort to mankind; but we now know that plastics are a shadow bringing death (chemicals leeched into food, exotic chemicals of plastic in contact with your skin, plastics as filler in food). The human body, nor the body of any animal, can digest synthetics.

            I feel nothing but sorrow for those who do not want salvation/regeneration/resurrection. They believe, after life (which is so short) that they will just become fertilizer...that there is no life beyond death. The evolutionist, Charles Darwin, who wanted to be a doctor, ran from the hospital the first time he heard the screams of pain from surgery (this was before anesthesia). He then thought he could convince the world that this life is all there is to it. Later, Carl Sagan (Cosmos), stated that this is all there is, nothing else. Most of your teachers/college professors, even your neighbors, have their unbelief/doubts/fears about life here and what follows. The creator of the universe actually dictated a book containing all the answers. Everything about his word, everything about the comfort of the shade he supplies us, everything about the shadows that have always been lurking, tells us that we should not approach the certain "end-of-life" with indifference.