Holy beyond the hype, let quiet exaltation harmonize this day’s portion of your life’s movement. This, and the next eleven, are days for the outlasting of what noise has been.
In 2007, I spent the last week of October on Ocracoke, resting, writing, playing. This year, I will do it in the last week of December. Which is now. I do anticipate that drive.
All this, and the company of friends, in South Carolina’s low country, anticipating Charleston food. It was a nice day.
(originally published in Hopewell News)
Rain, gentle and cold, falls tonight. It is a soft abundance. The sound of it is tranquility’s lacy hem, sweeping lightly the angel path between Heaven and Here. What was it they said? You are favored by God. The Lord is with you. Don’t be afraid.
It is good to be awake. It is remarkable to know that God wished me alert and listening in this exact moment. Whatever possible other options, which might have found my liking more ready, are less good because God did not choose them. Here and now, awareness is the only act of worship I know and endorse. When I wake up tomorrow, that might be different. But when must not slice the flavor from this holy now…There’s rain falling on scattered brown leaves! God’s voice calls out in each tiny splash of this delicate roar. And my spirit will not resist calling back:
Come, Emmanuel! As soon as that is the right and timely thing for you to do, come to us. Abide with us. Inhabit that song in my heart that begs for your presence. Attend the thoughts and relax the facial muscles of people who disbelieve your return, people so practiced in the arts of negating ambient joy. Show them good news. Stable-ize their hearts, and be born there. Make them not afraid. Overglow them with true love and unreasonable joy that speaks clearly from a cold and gentle rain.
Amen.
From the dates on the Flickr site, you can see that these photos are nearly a month old. Since then, these leaves have lost their color and lost their grip. And the forests through which they fell are beautiful now in a different way. A good year is when autumn dreads not the winter and winter envies not the autumn. A good life is something like that, too.
