Health in Your Hands???

"Your health in your hands" reads the tagline on a website ...


I thought, "True enough, but are there no other hands?"


What about the hands that manage the air I breath?
Or the hands that grow, process and package the food I eat?
The hands that mange the water I drink?
The hands that fill our world with ads to eat this, buy that, drink all the more?


Our health is in lots of hands.
Hands that would just as soon remain anonymous.


And, of course, if we get sick, it's our fault.
No one else's.
Because our health is in our hands.


Or so the other hands want us to believe.

Well, It's Sunday!

Well, it's Sunday.
Now what?
For me?
Church.


Been there all of my life.
Early-on memories, dark
Vaulted, beamed
Ceiling.


Pews too high for
Short legs.
Swinging away.
Listening.


Parents, brother.
Preacher in the pulpit.
Windows, glass, stained.
Light.


Pot luck dinners.
VBS, and I didn't like it.
Not one bit.
Played a seed in the Sower Drama.


God.
Early-on memories.
Presence.
Good and kind and loving.


I don't know what religion means.
I don't know what church is all about.
It's my DNA.
It's bone of my bone.


I cry with music.
I nod my head in hope.
I pray to be mindful and kind.
I want things for my family.


Life is short.
And gets shorter all the time.
Days hurry on.
Time passes on.


It's Sunday.
A time to think about
Passing things, and things, that may be
Permanent.

Mud Everywhere ... a Memory of Beginnings!

The end of 1969, D and I left Holland, MI in our light green ‘66 VW Beetle and drove down to Charleston, West Virginia to begin a two-year stated supply with the West Virginia Mountain Project.

It had rained a lot, and West Virginia south of Charleston was flooded, so we holed up in Charleston motel for a few days. We arrived at night, so it was only in the morning, with cloudy skies and barren trees, that we saw the “hills of West Virginia” and the swollen Kanawha River, in what would be our first home after seminary, an experience that would come to shape the remainder of my ministry and political values.

We finally got to our home, a new little manse, off the main road, over the railroad tracks, up the holler, next to the white clapboard church, on a little rise at the foot of a mountain, the mining town of Ridgeview - everything there high and dry, and so we moved in, without furniture, as it would be a few days until the moving van arrived.

My first task, hurriedly arranged, an agent for FEMA, and my “office,” a dingy bar beneath a railroad trestle, beside Brush Creek, Nellis, West Virginia, to fill out reports for people claiming flood damage.

I remember: mud everywhere.

Cold, damp, grey, and the tired, tired, faces of those who had lost so much.

Is There a God?

Is there a God?
Perhaps ... maybe not.
Whether there is or isn't doesn't seem to make a lot of difference ... as folks seem to make of it whatever they darn well please ...
A god of hate?
A god of love?
A god of damnation?
A god of welcome?
And a little of this and a little of that.
We all know the tired and dangerous claims: god spoke to me ... god said to me ... it's in the revealed word of god ... god's spirit convinced me ...


And, yes, a lot of goodness comes from that ... but so does a lot of evil.
Hospitals and schools built ...
and slaves to farm the cotton and cane ...
and prisons for those who would make trouble for those who own the cotton and cane ...
and visions of social justice in the likes of a Martin Luther King, Jr. ...
and the healing hands of Mother Teresa ...
and the gun-slinging patriots who believe that Jesus favors open-carry ...
and every form of nobility and love ...
and every form of bigotry and hate.


This pretty much leaves the question open.
I guess its up to you and me to chose.
And like the Knight said to Indiana Jones, "Choose wisely."

Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday it is ...
A time for deep and dark things.


For some, anguish and mourning.


For others, an unspecified, "I'm sorry."


Maybe a time to think of Christ:


His journey.
His pain.

Sorrow.
Death.

None of which is easy, of course.

So, maybe Ash Wednesday shouldn't be easy either.

Words ...

Words ...


A word isn't really word until it's embraced in a sentence of some sort.


That's what a word is all about ... the words that precede and follow it ... and depending on those words, the word itself might take on many a shade of meaning ... perhaps this or that ... or maybe not ... or maybe ...


Hinting at what it means ... leaving the final decision up to us ... for good or for ill ... up to us.


How to string words together ... in familiar patterns that comfort with their familiarity ... or in discomfiting ways, that catch our attention and arouse uneasiness ...


Words are not easy ... every try to catch smoke?


Words convey the mysteries of life ... from the salacious to the salubrious ... our highest hopes of a better world to the bitterness of disappointment ... trying, trying, trying, to understand what is always just beyond the tip of the finger, defying our gasp ... eluding us, and quickly pecking our cheek with an enticing kiss that keeps us alive and alert and still seeking to find ... slipping away at the moment of embrace ... laughing ... deriding ... beckoning ... and maybe we continue ... or maybe we retire from the field for a drink ...


Words ... they're all we have ... no matter the language, though other languages capture their own reality in their own way ... and it pays to know something about other languages other than one's own ... even a few words of another can shed light on whatever it is we seek.


And who knows what we seek?


If it isn't one thing, it's another ...


The human spirit is restless ... always seeking ... never finding ... at least anything permanent ... but only the passing, the fragments, like a good lunch that satisfies until about 6 o'clock, and then hunger once again ... and so we get out our victuals, and turn on the stove ... and get out our dictionaries, and take up our pen, or the keyboard ... and we prepare something to satisfy ... and we know, to satisfy, only for a time.


Words ... strange critters ...


They're all we have.

War Wagon Parade

A parade of war wagons

Through my neighborhood

Dark, hulking, war wagons.

Throbbing engines, darkly tinted windows

Moving slowly through the neighborhood

Bringing children to school

SUVs, 4x4s, tricked-out vans

Parents and children

How different in Europe

Everything smaller

Fuel efficient

But, heck, what do they know?

Nothin’ but a bunch of weak-kneed socialists

Too soft to know better

So, hats off to the war wagons

Onward Christian Soldiers

Tons of steel and darkened glass

Wow, ain’t God good?

The war wagon parade