Looking For The Long Ride

I have recently come to the awareness that very few of us ever really know one another. That what we say we know of each other is in reality only what we have allowed our minds to see instead of what is really in front of us. That most of the time we are living in past realities instead of current circumstances. We say we want to know one another and be known but that is far from the truth of where we live everyday.

Bob Dylan said that…”I am right from my side and you are right from yours but we are both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.”

I am convinced that we have mental perceptions of one another that are kinda of like boxes that we keep each other in: boxes that become the shape of who we think people are. Once we are in someone’s box, it is very difficult to ever get them to see the authentic you or me that exists in flesh and blood and not a certain shaped box. And why would anyone want to be bold and daring enough to even consider that what their perception of you or me is, is not one of reality but a fabrication of past circumstances that have created this mental picture or box.

I have also come to the conclusion that much of what you see of me is made up of what I have given you to perceive: if I am insecure I have given you a subconscious cue to treat me from a place of insecurity. In other words rather than your interactions with me helping me to overcome this condition, your reactions to me will play into the insecurity that is already there as if I had scripted our interaction with this dynamic in play.

The bad news is that this thought process and the unveiling of the scripts we live out can be overwhelming.

The good news is that with a little work, much of what is distorted can be brought into the light and become something that is really authentic.

In talking with a friend last evening, it was apparent to me that he had done a lot of thinking about this very same thing. He told me that he believed that most people have never met their authentic selves. He agreed that our perceptions of one another are quite often wrong and that the only way to get on the other side of this dilemma is to be born again unto a new way of thinking and looking at reality.

Much of what I am relating has come from listening to some teaching tapes by a Dr. Michael Ryce. A lot of what he talks about can be found at: Heartland

I could go on an on about some of what I have been thinking about as pertains to his teachings but will end today with a link sent to me by my farmer friend Alan. He has recently done a series on perceptions and I will attach that link when it becomes available. In the meantime here is a link that says alot about our perceptions.

Paul Potts sings Nessun Dorma

Enjoy!

As I sit in our outdoor living room it is a cool 78 degrees with a slight breeze. I am torn between the need to journal and touch base with the process of life and the idea that what I am going through is much to complex to even begin to describe. That is the lot of the poet and blogger—what can really be known of this life that we are a part of and how can one even begin to make a dent into the fabric of understanding it on the cosmic level.

I feel a pull to create something new so that you will not be disappointed when you click the link to see if any progress has been made from my last post. I also am aware that time is passing and that I am at my best when images and words are flowing through my fingers and onto a page or computer screen.

In reality there is really much too much happening to even begin to tell the story of it. Each passing day adds a color here or a sentence there that when taken as a whole is quite significant and well worth waiting for—a good stew is allowed to simmer for a while before it is served up allowing all the different flavors to mingle and grow comfortable with each other to our mutual benefit.

It is twenty to eight as I type: there are one or two cicada’s beginning to make their evening song—by ten there will be hundreds and it will be virtually impossible to distinguish one from all the others. It is like going to see the symphony—as we sit in the audience we watch as each player comes to the stage with their instrument and find their place. First violin and second trumpet and so on down the line. They place their music on the stand and eventually begin to warm up until all are on stage and the concert master gives the signal to produce that one note that everyone will tune to. After this the conductor comes to the podium and brings everyone to attention and the musical program begins.

Last night as I sat in the very same place I realized that there were no words in my vocabulary to describe the song of the katydid or cicada. Their voice or song is a rapid click, click, click or a chica-chica-chic and sounds sort of ratchet like winding an old clock with a buzz/buzz/buzz and every other note a tone above or below the one before it. One beat and and half and then a rapid eight or sixteenth note run that starts on your left and fades to your right—the perfect surround sound experience.

Here is what I wrote then:

As dusk surrounds me
I have to wonder what it is
I am really seeing
As I look through eyes
Looking through trees leaves
into grey sky.

A stream of air moves the leaves
at the top of the trees
but leaves those lower branches
almost still.

There is a liquidness to the air tonight
as if there is a substance—a depth
of surface—thick and thin
at the same time.

What lies in this space between
You and me—what realities
are formed by that
invisable distance.

Oxygen molecules dancing
off one another—yet the air is still now—waiting
for a hand to reach down from the heavens
and give this substance
a push in my direction.

The cicada’s, like clockwork
grow louder as the day turns to night—one
voice here and another there—then a
symphony or cacaphony of buzzing
and humming and purring—motorlike
in its’ harmony—turn the key
and the engine fires.

Chicka, chicka, chicka
a certain fast ratchet—slow buzz-buzz-buzz
a music that has no nationality—it is ethnic
yet not refined—simple folk music
but an orchestra sized sound mixing gently
with a late August evening.

It really doesn’t get any better than this!

I certainly can’t speak to any other area of the country but our weather here in the mountains of North Carolina has been just short of fantastic. The just short part has little to do with temperatures and sunny skies and a lot to do with the lack of rain we, along with many other areas, have received.

My farmer buddy in Stoney Point, when asked the other if they had received any rain recently, replied no…but that he was still breathing and that was a good sign.

And we all must admit that weather is one of those things that we talk alot about but can’t control. We seem to be at the mercy of storm patterns and high pressure and low pressure systems and fronts of all kinds moving this way and that.

If there are any love/hate relationships in our lives, weather is probably in the running for first or second place.

The perfect weather for me would be mid-seventies during the day and cooler at night with periods of light soaking rain every few days between the hours of 2am and 5am in the morning.  And I will have to admit that as I get older, winters have become less and less enjoyable. I still really like fall—there is a fresh smell in the air and when the mountains get all multi-colored it is really a sight to behold.

All this having been said, I will add that last Saturday I took what will have to be recorded as one of the best bike rides I have ever been on. My friend Glen and I took off from our starting point at about 11am and proceeded north along Rail Road Grade Road and kept going when it turned into Three Top Road just across Hwy. 194. The first part of Three Top is an uphill grade until you reach a peak about 1,200 feet from where we began. Then it is downhill from there until the road dead-ends at NC Highway 88 in Creston, NC. When we reached this point we sat for a few minutes outside a Methodist church and ate our Clifbars and then headed the 15 or 16 miles back to where we began. The ride back is a slow continuous grade up where you can maintain a good 10-13 mph pace which gives you the time to appreaciate the scenery—the river that runs right beside the road and the mountains that surround you and the Carolina blue ski that was dotted with clouds and kept the direct sunlight away from us for most of the ride.

It is the stuff poetry is made of especially for a biker. Did I mention that the pavement is smooth and free of cracks and that we only saw about ten cars in our 2 hour and fifteen minute ride? It is all a part of what makes it so special on a Saturday in the mountains. It is even possible that we were riding over ground that Lance Armstrong covered during his training times here several years ago. And that at the end of 32+ mile ride we could have done another 20 because we were feeling just that good. But alas, the time was not there on that almost perfect day to ride another mile—we both had things to do and places to be. But that’s the way it is with bike riding and life in general—if we get to do what we want it is a pleasure—if it doesn’t last as long as we want it to then that is what we get and need to be happy with as well. There is always the next time—the benchmark has been moved up a little and we know we can do a harder/longer ride than the one we did just before the last one. It is a good feeling and one that I want to have again and again and again.

Enjoy your ride today.

At this point I really can’t explain why time and time related things have been on my mind. Except that everything I read and every movie I see—and yes—even my own life is described and felt and lived out in sentences, poems and relationships that mark the passage of time.

Wednesday evening Sandi and I went to see the movie “No Reservations” which is the American re-make of the German movie called “Mostly Martha”. It is basically about a female chef who ends up having to take care of her niece and all the ramifications that follow in the footsteps of that decision. I happened across “Mostly Martha” a year or so ago on Netflix and enjoyed it and since the reviews of the new movie were positive, thought that it would be worthwhile checking the American version out. It is a good movie—well acted and filmed and not overly romantic. It describes the events and passage of time from just before Kate (the chef) takes in her niece unto a time several months into the future. The movie contains all of the elements of a good story although what these are escape me at the moment. ¡Qué ellos son actualmente no es importante!

Anyway, on the drive home after the movie, Sandi and I began to talk about what it means to “make every moment count” and how hard this concept is to seemingly fulfill in our everyday lives. The balance between what you have to do and what you would like to do if you could do anything at all. Or even going so far as to say even making the most of every moment doing what you have to do. As if any of what we have to do or don’t have to do has any bearing on making the most of every moment. I guess you can see where I am headed with this.

Most of us have lived our entire lives with the knowledge that many opportunities are missed in living everyday. How often do we have to hear “stop and smell the roses” before we actually slow down enough to see all the many facets of our lives that come into play at any given moment. The poet Robert Frost talked of the road taken and the one not chosen alluding all the while to the different realities that each one held.

It’s kinda like the difference between being a tourist or a resident—as a tourist, our time is more or less our own and we can often take time along the way to really look at what is around us—that’s what is called a vacation. As a resident, we generally have a schedule to follow and are very goal directed and somewhat blind to what is around us—having seen the same scenery day after everyday.

I remember being in the subway tunnels in New York City and in the process of getting from one train to another, crossing underneath a street where on one side stood a man talking about the gospel. And even though he wasn’t shouting hell-fire and brimstone messages and seemed very balanced in his presentation—no one was stopping or otherwise signaling that they were even paying attention. Everyone was on their way someplace—even Sandi and I—and he wasn’t on our schedule for that particular morning. I doubt that we would have stopped and listened to Beethoven at that point if he had been playing one of his greatest sonatas.

Yet, later in the day, we stopped by Washington Square Park and languished for an hour or two in between destinations and watched the people of the city being the people of the city. It was a planned stop in an otherwise semi-unplanned full-bore-busy day in the Big Apple.

What would happen if we all started acting like tourists in our own everyday lives—taking time to talk to the waitress and encourage the shopkeeper as we move along inside our daily routine.

This may sound random, but I have just come to the conclusion that if you only want to recieve something from life then it really doesn’t matter that much to me whether you show up or not. Conversely, if you are living your life in order to give something of yourself away each and every day, then you will be connected, concerned and fully paying attention to the little details that seem to mean so much.

Making the most of each moment is then really not something that we do as much as a way of living that begins in looking for opportunites to be connected to what is going on around us and then making a choice to be a participant rather than an observer and in so doing our timeline will become more interesting—for ourselves and for those around us.

Lets just say for the sake of this story that time is like a river that runs from far up north to the deep, deep south and as far as we can tell, has no beginning and no end. We have heard that the river begins in some cave far beneath the earth’s surface but so far no one has ever seen its beginning. As to where the river ends—we can pinpoint the exact place where it meets the ocean but from that point and where it goes from there and what continents the river touches—one cannot be sure.

The river as time analogy continues as we see it in the summer—running slow and shallow—needing rain. And then—after a big storm—the river running high and muddy and fast.

On a map this river looks like a line that runs its course across the paper—twisting this way and that—running straight for a while and then filling the page with bends and turns.

As the river, so is the timeline of our lives—we enter the river at a certain point in bodily form and then at some point in time the body is burned or buried but the river continues to flow.

Lets say for the sake of the story that at some point we see a break in the timeline of our lives and step outside the shape of what has been holding us and all that we know in the pattern of the river.

What would we see…what would time look like. Would we only see what is in front of our faces or would we be able to see past, present and future as if they were all one and the same—only slightly different depending on how far left or right we turned our heads.

Would everything stop for us as we stepped out of our timeline? Would we then be able to go back in time and say the right thing at that time we said the wrong thing. Or study a little harder for that mid-term exam—that when we didn’t get a good grade began to change the course of our life.

If our lives are but one continuous wave length amongst all the others that exist simultaneously—there are indeed certain events that mark the passage of time as it relates to our personal journey through it. Our first bike, first date, first kiss—our first real job. What follows is marriage, kids, building homes—keeping our kids under our watchful eye and then letting them go after graduation to live their own lives with their own spouses in their own homes.

Certain events mark us forever—like an illness or disease that enters our timeline and seems to take all the wind out of our sails—but when overcome will change our lives forever and for the better. Adversity that seems too hard at first but later will put us into a better postition to navigate than before.

Time is tricky and sometimes sticky—like a song that we hear that takes us back to the time when we first heard it. If it marked an important event in your life you will remember the sounds and smells and feelings of that particular time as if they were happening today. Melancholy is maybe a state of being when the unresolved past enters the future unfiltered and triggers the emotional state that still exists for us to feel.

I will have to admit that my time outside the timeline has been interesting—but we do reach a point where our desire is to get back in the water and simply just enjoy the ride for as far as the river will take us. Some of us will make it to the ocean and some of us won’t but let’s enjoy today while it is still called today.

I have recently been reading a little book that my wife found for me at a rummage sale. It is one of those books that finds its’ way into your life that you probably would never have found on your own. The book’s title is “Einstein’s Dreams” and was written several years ago by Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and writing at MIT.

In this book (according to a review written by Idris Hsi), “Alan Lightman has created a series of vignettes
that describe some dreams that Einstein could have had while trying to
understand the mysteries of relativity, space, and time.  Each vignette
contains a world that behaves according to a particular model or perception
of time and space, inhabited by people who have evolved behaviors and philosophies
as a consequence of this paradigm.”

I really couldn’t have said it any better.

There is a story where time is slower at higher elevations and there is a massive migration to the mountains so that people will be able to live longer. People at lower elevations even build their houses on stilts in order to maximize the effect of time on their lives.

Another story talks about how each moment is so slow that people get lost between sticking a fork into a salad and the fork actually making it to their mouths. There is also the world where you live your whole life somewhere between dawn and the setting of the sun. The other side of this is the people who live their lives bewteen dusk and sunrise and therefore never really see the sun.

Other than the possibility that different time dimensions exist at the same time as our own, the book did get me thinking about time and how we pereceive it. Some waste time as if there were no end to it for themselves. Other people seem to make each moment count as if it will end someday soon.

The bible tells us that our time on earth is as the life of a flower—short in relation to the whole of what has been and what more is to come—a mere vapor so to speak ( James 4:14).

I do know that our perception of time changes as we age—summer as a child used to be almost like an entire year and now seems like just so many weeks. The time between each Christmas seems shorter each year and that is not because stores begin to advertise the holiday long before Thanksgiving—although that may also be a sign of how time is perceived as well.

Bob Dylan told us back in the late 60’s that the times were changing but didn’t tell us that 40 years later we would still be listening to that song as well as others that he has written.

As I write this my daughter is preparing to enter high school on the 8th of August. I am from up north and we never started school until after labor day. Here in the mountains they call off school at the hint of a snowfall (for safety’s sake) but up north where the roads were flat and straight we hardly ever had a snow day unless there came a blizzard of two or three feet.

It seems like it was just yesterday that Laura was beginning school—now she often cooks her mom and me dinner, knows more about the computer than the average kid and is becoming a beautiful young lady. Why—we have even started some around-the-neighborhood driving lessons in anticipation of an actual license in a year or so.

Time does seem to fly except when you are in a traffic jam or grocery store line that doesn’t seem to be moving. Then it creeps along at a snail’s pace and seems to go slower the more you think about it.

So, as we navigate through life, remember this: there are people all around us moving at different paces within their very own time zones. For some the speed limit is not posted and for others it is a conservative 45 miles per hour. Some people are still living in the past and haven’t moved into the present where most of us hang our hats. Some are so into the “now” that yesterday is already a distant memory (if remembered at all) and tomorrow hasn’t even crossed their minds yet.

Other people we meet like to control time and are always where their daytimer says they should be. Some don’t wear watches and just like to know that it is today—they eat when they are hungry and sleep when they are tired and try to live peacfeully the rest of the time.

I guess the moral to the story is that if we keep looking for the time to do something, chances are we never will.

Or as Bob Dylan said:

Well, the moral of the story, The moral of this song, Is simply that one should never be Where one does not belong. So when you see your neighbor carryin’ somethin’, Help him with his load, And don’t go mistaking Paradise For that home across the road.

Copyright © 1968; renewed 1996 Dwarf Music

As I once again read some of my early blog entries from several months ago I have to admit—in front of God and everybody—that I am almost embarrassed by some of the grammar I encountered.

I began blogging just as I was coming off a long period of not feeling appreciated by those I was in relationship with and jumped right into the pool and I guess—by what I saw today—never looked back. It was almost painful for me to navigate through the mis-spellings and truncated sentences and otherwise stream of concsiousness type of stuff I am so prone to.

My writing has become much better and you don’t have to wade through as much stuff to get to the meat of what I am trying to convey today as you did several months ago. Thanks for sticking with me.

Sandi and I took some time last week to attend a movie priemier for “The List” which is based on a book by Robert Whitlow of the same name. It was the world premier in Charlotte, NC and of course the theatre was packed with cast and crew and all of us invitee’s. It was directed by a friend of ours Gary Wheeler and is a good beginning to what will hopefully be a long career in making movies. It is Christian themed at a time in history when people are looking for something more than what they see in everyday life. It is about the power of people praying yet is done in such a way that it doesn’t seem like a Christian movie about the power of prayer.

It stars Malcom Mc Dowell, Hilary Burton (One Tree Hill) and Chuck Carrington (JAG) and has a scene with Will Patton (Armagendon). It is not cheesy and thrown together but is of the same stature as the “End of the Spear” movie about the missionaries that were killed in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956. Not quite as hollywood but professionally done, well acted and great cinematography.

It may take a while to come to Boone but hopefully will show up, if not in a big theatre, at least the little indy theatre that is being built across from the Wellness Center here in Boone. I was talking with the indy theatre owner at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday and she said that the theatre may open in the fall. More about that later.

So—if you get a chance before that—do take time to see the movie—you will be glad that you did.

I am reminded of the fact today that it was 29 years ago that my wife and I loaded up my old truck and her Datsun B-210 and moved to the mountains of North Carolina. I can remember this because we moved from Michigan right after celebrating my 29th birthday on August 1st with friends.

Witin several weeks of arriving in North Carolina, we had found an old house to live in for free if we fiixed it up and had been married by an Episcopal priest on top of the big hill behind what was to be our home for the next seven years.

In the most rudimentary of spiritual terms this is what I would now call an open door—in other words as we move through life and make daily decisions that affect which paths we travel and which ones we don’t—it is like some doors are open to us to walk through and some doors are closed. Not that there is any big screen image flashing in front of you as you walk through or past another door—or for that matter different types of prizes hidden behind them. It is a sense that you have that in the big sceme of things this way is right and that way isn’t.

The scriptural basis for this statement or belief is from Isaiah 30:21 which says:

21 Your ears will hear a word behind you, “This is the ^(AU)way, walk in it,” whenever you ^(AV)turn to the right or to the left.

In life we are often presented with several options pertaining to the direction of our lives and need to choose just one and move on. Which job do we take or what car is best for us or what major in college do we study are just some of the decisions we are faced with.

If you believe in open doors then the converse is also true: you believe in closed doors.

Sometimes what was once an open door or window of opportunity that you enter into and run with for a time changes to a closed door.

For example: I worked for 3 1/2 years for a small independant newspaper in Ashe County. A door was opened for me to get the job. During this time my wife began to make baskets and we started doing art fairs and this little hobby turned into almost a full time thing. It seemed like a door was being opened to begin this new thing while at the same time a door was closing on what had previously been an open door event (my getting the job with the newspaper) once upon a time.

The point I am trying to make here is that it is sometimes hard to see what was once an open door—a God leading if you will—turn into a closed door. What was once a full bore blessing becoming something that is no longer the path you need to be on. It is hard to see that something that once had the mark of God’s blessing not being something that you would continue doing. Change is always difficult but when an open door time turns into a closed door situation, it is best to get re-aligned as soon as possible.

Sometimes we get little signs along the way and over time that things are beginning to shift in the spiritual and natural dynamics of our lives.

When Sandi and I found our fixer-upper free starter house in was like paradise to us—we were located several miles from the nearest town and right in the middle of several hundred acres of farm and woods land. We had the run of the place since it hadn’t been lived in for many, many years. The guy who owned it was happy for us to be there and gave us free rent for fixing it up for the first five years. When we first found it the house was in rough shape but not beyond repair—I thought it was just the place for us and Sandi almost cried from the other point of view. She came around pretty quick and we had two of our four children in that very house.

As the years went by and we began to feel a little less permanent in our surroundings, little things began to happen that called our attention to the door of that reality was slowly shutting. It was indeed a blessing but was now not as fullfilling—the owner had begun to let people use the property around us to plant christmas trees and get hay and so forth and we began to feel more of a push towards something else even though we were a little unsure of what that might be. So we went from feeling like we had everything to knowing that we didn’t in about 5 years and stayed for a couple more after that before moving to Boone and the house we currently live in. We really didn’t have any money for a new house but started looking anyway and things just kind of fell together (an open door) for us to get a low rate mortgage without much of a downpayment.

The blessing of a free house became less and less of one until we started looking for another—at which point that door began to open wide and seeing that made the move a lot easier. I guess you could say it was from blessing to blessing and not really get caught up in the transition phase when things don’t look or feel to comfortable. There are always valleys to go through as we move from the mountain top to the mountain top.

Maybe I have explained myself well or missed the mark today but what I do know is that Sandi and I are looking for the next open door and our prayer is that we would see it and walk through it without letting too much time go by. It is nice to still be on the road and riding out the rest of our lives.

In my last post I brought up the subject of resting in God and what that term might mean and how it aplies to our daily walk as Christians. What I left out of the equation is that this term is mostly used in conjunction with the concept of “trusting in God”.

So let’s just say for arguments sake that you are in a church or job situation where some thing is not going in the direction you would like to see it go. Maybe you feel the church body has not been as welcoming to visitors as you see described in scripture and you address this area of concern with someone in a leadership position. Maybe you have prayed about it or maybe not but you feel burdened enough by it to act.

The leaders may accept you with open arms or label you a trouble maker but that is not the point. You have done what you felt was the right thing to do. The question is this: is taking action not trusting in God—whereby trusting in God means that you believe that He is in control and will take care of the situation if you just “rest” and pray.

I guess you can see where I am going here -it is confusing to me and I have been around these kinds of things for many a year now.

I am generally the type that when I see something I feel needs addressing—I do—and many times in the past this has been to my detrement. My quandry is when is it appropriate to keep quiet and in so doing you are exercising your faith by “trusting” God and then once the situation has been prayed about you “rest” and do nothing and wait for God to handle it. I mean King David was annointed King of Israel many, many years before Saul was eventually taken out of the picture. He had many opportunities to take him out himself and would not lift his hand against the Lord’s chosen. He even felt bad about cutting off that little piece of cloth from his robe while he was in the cave.

I have lately been feeling that I don’t trust God enough to take care of the situations that I find my self in in this life. It seems there is never enough money to get rid of the debt we have accumulated. I was working freelance for a business a couple of years ago that enabled us to do a lot of the extra things that a regular 9 to 5 paycheck doesn’t quite cover. But the work always came into me late in the production cycle and I found myself spending many evenings away from my family in front of the computer in the basement to get the various projects to the printer on time. After what I thought was much prayer and consideration, I raised my freelance rates and the client took his work elsewhere. I did this believing that God would take care of the rest and that I would get some new work in from someone who could stick to a realistic schedule and who valued me enough to respect the bounderies that I needed to operate within.

This never happened and to this day I don’t know why.

Yes, I got myself into debt and I can’t expect God to be some Sugar Daddy doleing money out to me whenever I need it irregardless of the circumstances of how and why and wherefore. But at the time—and also currently— I felt that I was doing the right thing for my health and wellbeing even though I gave up several thousand dollars a year in extra income that could be very useful at this point in life.

Maybe it is like that old faith message from years back that went like this: You can have faith to believe that the key in your hand will start the car in your driveway but until you put it into the ignition and turn it, your faith is just a belief and not a reality. Did I misplace the key or choose the wrong car—I don’t know at this point.

Is it foolish of me to believe that the story I just told you has anything to do with trusting God, faith and/or resting? Am I being presumptuous in thinking that I was correct in my belief system about God  and how He wroks and that somehow I failed in keeping my end of the “bargain” whatever that might be construed to be. In other words I trust in God and am rewarded for that trust by getting a new client who appreciates me and my time constraints enough to be on time and not force me into working at hours that I don’t really want to be working. Seemed simple enough at the get go but I guess is like so many other things in life that we live through and continue to make an attempt to understand and grow with. But it is still a mystery and seems destined to remain so.

Like the many other things we have believed over the years, this part of life is currently under the microscope and what we do with it and how long we look at it before coming to terms with it and moving on to something else has not been decided. What I don know at this point is that on any given day with a 60 percent chance of rain there is always a 40 percent chance that it won’t. If you want to take a ride on that kind of day there is a good likelyhood that you will get wet—but then again a chance that you won’t.

How long has it been since your last ride?

After doing almost nothing that could by any stretch of the imagination be called constructive this past week on vacation, Sandi and I went to a friends house where some men from the middle east were visiting.

It was a “restful” week and was more or less planned that way from the beginning. So it was almost an effort to get out of my easy chair and drive the 10 miles to my friends house.

We arrived a bit late and within a few minutes the men began to take turns telling us in their broken english what was happening spiritually in the places where they are living—we are talking in and around Serbia, Greece, Jordan, etc. It is always interesting to find out that no matter where you live, God is God and many of the same things happen in their lives from a Christian perspective as they do in ours far across the sea from where they reside.

After three of the men had shared briefly what was happening in their locales, the fourth man got up and had a few “prophetic” words for some of us attending, including me. I had brought along a computer and was intent on recording what they had to say but unfortunately something glitchy happened and I was not able to save the audio file completely without big gaps in the recording.

I can’t totally remember what he said to me but the gist of the word was that I liked doing my job, that God was going to reveal Himself to me in a new way and that I needed to “rest”. So I guess what I have been up to this past week is totally in line with God’s plan for my life—rest with a capital R.

It is at this point in our little discourse that I have to admit to you that I don’t really totally understand from a biblical perspective what resting is. The bible seems to imply that ceasing from your own works is resting. Confused as usual, I called my buddy Alan and asked him if he thought that resting meant doing nothing and being quiet—in other words letting God do everythng.

I was surprised by his answer.

He told me that resting is sometimes waiting on God but that if we believe that we hear God and that the truth is in us, there are definately times to share this truth with others. Sharing this truth, which can be directional or correctional in nature, is not not resting in God. Just being quiet—for fear of interupting God’s plan—and not sharing what we believe that we have is not resting in God.

I am still not sure I understand what resting is but I am on my way to the next mile marker on the road that we are all traveling on.

So yesterday, while everyone was away, I took a long walk and during that time asked God to teach me about rest. I also admited, rather belatedly, that I may have a warped persepctive on who Jesus is and that I needed some fresh revelation in my life, not new revelation. I am a firm believer that we have lots of stuff inside of us that just needs to be refreshed or re-newed every once and a while in order that we can proceed down the road we are traveling on.

I will be the first to admit that I have believed some rather bizarre stuff over the years and that I have been hurt by the very church that was supposed to show me a picture of what Jesus looks like over the years. But I do believe in a new and exciting way, that the road we are currently on is one where we will begin to see all the things that have been distorted or hidden from us in the past.

And as I have said before—that’s a ride worth taking any day. Enjoy yours.