Bob Dylan & Cutting the Cable

Posted on January 17, 2014 by terryhenry2014

Sandi and I were once a part of what I will call the broadcast television generation. What this means to me is that many of our evenings were focused around the prime-time hours from 9pm until 11 o’clock. Many of the shows that we watched from week to week were nestled into the 10 o’clock time zone and so bedtime for us was most normally about a few minutes after 11. Realistically we could then get a full 8 hours of rest by awaking at 7 and still get to work by 8. This was our pattern for several years until we cut the cable and and/or dish cord in late 2012. Things have not been the same since.

My bill went from almost a hundred bucks a month to more like $24 with subscriptions to Hulu Plus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. 
However, what this change meant was that we really started watching our favorite shows, mostly a day later than broadcast around 8:30. With most of the commercials gone, shows only take up about 48 minutes. This being the case, we were done watching our two shows by 10 or a little after which gave us about 30 or 40 minutes to spare before our “normal” bedtime of 11. 
What I found out many times is that going to bed early causes me to wake up around 3 am. Normally I can grab a glass of water and fall back into dream land and wake about 6:30 or 7 in a normal pattern. However, this is not always the case and there is nothing more frustrating than lying awake for an hour and trying to find that comfortable position without waking your spouse. 
What I tend to do on those early-to-bed evenings, when my eyes are to tired to read or I am bored with my uke, is to pull out my iPod and listen to some music. When I was younger I listened to music all the time but as I have grown older, music has taken a back seat to so many other interests, grand babies being one of the best.
Which leads me to the real meat of this post: Bob Dylan and his 1975 album entitled “Blood On The Tracks”. 
Since I never know what kind of musical mood I will be in, my iPod is loaded with a lot of different styles of music: from Peter, Paul and Mary, through Miles Davis, Muddy Waters and Alanis Morissette (a little something for every mood).
The past few nights I have listened to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks several times. In 1975, this album was one of those bright spots that entered my life during a period of radical change and growth. I was 25 going on 26 and the days were long and the nights were heavy, to coin a phrase. I was living in an attic apartment, riding a bike and was the director of the East Lansing Arts Workshop, located in the Old Marble School. I was printing poetry broadsides on an old letter press printing machine and learning to play the flute from a lady who had four kids and played in the local symphony during whatever free time she had left.
Anyway, this album was a radical departure from what Dylan had been doing and the total ambiguity and randomness of his lyrics was just what I needed to fan the fire of my own developing creativity. Dylan has always been a hard one to pin down in terms of what his songs are really saying. What I have noticed in my recent listening is that he rhymes most of his songs and that each sentence or stanza or verse is in one sense independent and yet still relates to the verse before it and what comes after. He is a unique storyteller, with perhaps no equal, stringing together thoughts and phrases that are at once insightful and yet never quite fully revealing as to his ultimate intention.
After listening to this album and having followed his career thus far, I have to also wonder how in the world he can come up with all these stories and poems that he sets to music to amuse and entertain us with. I guess I will never know what fuels his creativity and/or his need to keep producing song after song for all these many years. All I know at this point is that his gift is perhaps a blessing and a not-so-much (I hesitate to use the word “curse”).
For most of us who measure out our lives evening by evening or weekend by weekend, the ragged edge that artists live on will remain a secret perhaps unfolding over time. 
What I do know is this: our journey’s are just as unique as Dylan’s yet are private and not broadcast in the public domain as is his. And today, as long as it is called today, that will be enough for me and hopefully for you.
Enjoy your ride!
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An “Aging” Conundrum

Posted on November 8, 2013 by terryhenry2014

By common definition a “conundrum” is a confusing and/or difficult problem or question. Not so much like being between a rock and a hard place but more like an unsettled feeling that hangs around far to long after the party is over and everyone else has left the building.


Conundrum is a word that I like to use when faced with conflicting opinions or points of view. It seems to have a nice ring to it and I like the fact that most people are really not sure of what it truly means. Most of the time, up to this point, I haven’t either.

It is much to easy to say that life is full of conundrum without being more specific as to what that statement means.

For this post, I will pose one significant illustration from my life in the hope that you and I will better understand the world that we live in as we travel the path from birth unto our final resting place.

For many years I have gathered art supplies in the hope that I will “one day” have the time and the inclination to further my lifelong interest in this particular aspect of the creative life. I have worked at an art supply company for almost 20 years and we have had many employee sales during this time that have allowed me to purchase slightly dinged or used supplies at minimal or no cost. Over the years, when the basement begins to look a little cramped for space because of all this “collecting” of good deals, my wife will suggest that we divest ourselves of some of these rescued supplies. And every time she does so I let go of a little more. 

At first I argued that these supplies were just waiting for me to get around to using them. But as time passed it became more and more apparent that the days of me creating “art” were never really going to materialize as I had envisioned it. Kind of like retirement—it is nice to think about but the reality is that most of us will never reach that state of peaceful, daily nirvana that we seemingly were promised back in grade school in the sixties.

Not that we won’t have some moments of rest and relaxation after our work a day world comes to an end. But what I have come to realize in this conundrum filled life is the very real fact that those future days are mostly a mirage—they seem real at what is now a distance but the closer we get the more dream-like they appear. I am only now beginning to see through the haze of my own special deception.

And it is not like we won’t ever get to where we think we are going. But the reality is that we only have today and this evening to begin to accomplish what we would like to experience in this life. If we are always waiting for the moment to come when we will have the time to live out our dream of learning to paint or play that autoharp that we bought years ago, we are living in a lie of sorts. What I mean is this—we may be blessed with many meaningful years of retirement—but to wait until that time to begin a project is like living in a fools paradise.

Today really is the beginning of the rest of our lives.

My goal today is to begin living in the moment so that when I reach that distant shore, I will have done what I have needed to do so that I have no regrets as to how I have spent my time here on earth. This change will not happen overnight—nor do I think I won’t stumble and fall in my quest to fully embrace what time I have. But just beginning to understand the process is really the essence of “looking for the long ride”.

Enjoy yours today, while it is still called today.


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The World Stage

Posted on October 17, 2013 by terryhenry2014

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.


Or so said bard excellent William Shakespeare in 1599’s play As You Like It.

And during the past two weeks we have witnessed what it is like to be held hostage by our great nation’s actor/politicians in Washington. And the thought I had about this while driving to work this morning is this: Is there anyone up there on Capital Hill actually looking out for the rest of the 316,869,000 people in the USA as of January 1st, 2013. 

And while I am certainly not “apolitical” or “apathetic” toward’s our system of governance, I am not the person you would come to in order to find out about the Affordable Care Act or whether or not the United States is really a Republic or a Democracy. I have slept a few times since the Political Science class I attended as a college student in the late sixties.

However, like most of us, I have my opinions about the state of the union, foreign diplomacy and the two party system we seem to be mired in (to mention just three).

I am stuck somewhere between being a “prepper” and person who believes that we have a Father God who looks after us in a deeply personal way. I know that if I prepare for hard times and have food stored for my family and if the rest of my neighborhood doesn’t, and they see the lights on in my house because my generator is working, they will be knocking at my door in short order and might be a little agitated after missing a few meals. I have come to the conclusion that there is no easy answer towards this “end times” dilemma. In other words, can anybody really be prepared for a major disruption in our food or power supply chain. At that point, worst case scenario, all the guns or gold in China won’t be enough to protect us from what will inevitably happen. We will share what we have until it is all gone and be the better for it.

Yet, this is not the point of my post, rabbit chasing aside.

I am fearful (might be to strong a word) that there is no one in power in America that fully understands the mess we are in and/or has the where-with-all to offer us a real solution for all that we are facing as a nation. The fact that our currency/economy is only as strong as we have faith in it is a case in point. 

The stock market seemingly rises and falls on whether or not Wall Street suits are happy with the way things are going, like it or not. Trouble in Iran, stocks go down—home building starts increase, stocks go up and so on and so forth. Simplified to be cliché—almost certain: forgive me, I can’t help myself.

After 40 years of legalized abortion in all fifty states there have been an estimated 54,559,615 abortions since the Supreme Court handed down its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. 

I am convinced that the United States has not yet felt what would biblically be called the wrath of God. Yet I do believe that we are reaping what we have sowed in an equally biblical sense. I can’t help but think that at least one or two of those babies aborted could have had the cure for cancer, been a musician the like of which has not been since since Bach or better yet, had the strength and/or intelligence to figure a way out of our current situation in America.

Yes, these are very broad strokes that I have painted with the last few sentences. These ideas represent only those on top of the heavy heap that I carry around in my mostly conscious mind.

I often wonder if we as a people are equipped to carry on the conversations that would lead to an agreement or unity of purpose that might be the first step in halting what seems to be the decline of another great nation or people group.

In other words, there is more that I could say but don’t have the words for today. What I will do however is continue to trust God, enjoy my wife, kids and grandkids and hope for a warm winter inside my house and an excellent garden next year. It’s been a good ride so far with a lot more to come.




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The Rhythm Of Life

Posted on October 9, 2013 by terryhenry2014

Gardening has been one of the joys of my life since Sandi and I moved to North Carolina in 1978 from Michigan. Every year is different and yet every year is somewhat the same. The one constant I have learned is the fact that every year we bring a little more knowledge and understanding to the process of growing food in dirt. All gardening efforts begin in dirt and hopefully end up in soil that has been built up and nourished through the years with compost, cover crops and other organic matter.


Why it was just a couple of years ago that I learned that the proper way to grow crops is to feed the soil which will in turn fertilize and/or feed our crops. Yet the “green revolution” of the late 1940’s through the 60’s took the opposite approach to feeding the world. This revolution included the widespread distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers in order to achieve higher yields per acre. All the while reducing the “soil” back to its “dirt” state and after years of this practice of feeding the plants and not the soil, yields began to decrease and insects once again began their quest for total plant destruction.

However I digress. There are lots of rabbits to chase another day but my point in writing today is this: just as there is in our personal lives, there is a yearly rhythm in gardening.

This fall I made the connection that what I end up with in terms of how my garden looks when harvested and cover crops planted is a lot of what it looks like in the spring when I begin again the planting chores. Bare ground when I am finished in the fall and bare ground again when I have cut the cover crop and tilled in the spring. The end is like the beginning although several months apart.

Last year I planted crimson clover for cover in time enough for it to root and grow before truly cold weather began. Yet it didn’t seem to do as well as the year before when I just barely got it planted before the first real frost. What I ended up with in the spring was a bunch of patchy bits of clover here and there and not everywhere. What I recently discovered was the fact that because we didn’t have a lot of snow cover to protect my green manure, it died off and didn’t do as well. Like I said, each year we learn just a little more about the nature of growing crops. We will never know it all and a lot of the fun is truly in the journey, not the destination.

This past year’s garden will go down in history as one of my worst efforts. In the mountains of North Carolina, we barely had a summer at all, with the raininess of spring keeping everything cold, moist and soggy well into what is normally considered summertime. Pepper plants which normally grow to about four feet languished at about a foot and a half for a month or two. My early potatoes did fine but the later plantings were mostly rained out. The corn did well overall, but the beans were eaten by rabbits, and the butternut squash, normally about 18 inches long barely made it to 9 or 10. And once the deer population knew there were tomatoes ripening, they couldn’t get enough even through the netting I covered them with—netting that has worked lo these many years.

Yet even a bad garden has its rewards and seemingly fits well into the rhythm of life scenario that we are exploring in this little post. 

To this end, and despite the lack of sunshine this past summer, I have learned a few things. One of which is this: occasionally we need to get off the grid and go for a long walk in the woods in order to recharge our batteries and gain perspective. The noise of the city, while temporarily invigorating, is not what I would consider the true rhythm of life. This rhythm can only be found in a place where you can finally hear the wind batting the leaves about—where the sounds of crickets, birds and other scurrying animals can be heard load and clear above the 60 cycle hum of modern life.

It is in these very places we can re-group and begin planning our next year’s garden—where faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not yet seen. Where we first grow it in our minds before we plant it in the ground.

And that my friends is a great winter’s ride if there ever was one.
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The End of an Era (or two)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by terryhenry2014

The daily newspaper has been a part of my life for as far back as I can remember. My earliest newspaper memories are of my father, sitting in his chair after dinner, with the evening paper unfolded in front of him. The paper was so big that all you could see of him were his legs and hands. I can still hear the rustle of the pages being turned and the sense of security I felt being a part, though only observant, of that daily routine.

As the years past, I would join the many boys and girls, in cities and states just like mine, who had paper routes. I grew up in Port Huron, Michigan and my first paper route was delivering the Detroit Free Press, a daily paper published each morning. Papers were supposed to be on subscribers porches by 7am, Monday through Friday, rain or shine. I remember that I had about 65 customers and on Saturday mornings I would work the route after delivery and collect paper money from most of my customers. We would then ride our bikes into town to pay our bill and hit the bowling alley before heading home and the chores that were always waiting to be done.

Paper routes were hard to come by and only became available when someone would move away or grow to old for the job. The best routes were those right around your house. After several months of delivering the Free Press, I was asked to take the Sunday Detroit News route. This paper was the size of the New York Times and took several trips to deliver since it was so heavy and only so many papers could be stuffed into the paper bags situated on each hip. The way it worked back then was the comics, the weekly magazine and the ads would be delivered on Saturday while I collected money. Since it was a kinder and simpler time, most people fit this into their routine and would be there with their money when you knocked on the front door. What they did the rest of the day I can only imagine but what I do remember is that the paper was a very important part of peoples lives during this period of time. All you had to do was miss them once to find out—they were not happy campers.

Many years and several roads traveled later, I would end up working three and a half years for a twice weekly newspaper as a reporter and ad salesman. This was long before the internet and I read at least two newspapers everyday in order to localize some of the stories that affected my small part of North Carolina.

I was still working at the Jefferson Times when the mac-paper USA Today was introduced to the American public and distributed in paper machines that looked a lot like a television. They were the first to take long in-depth stories and condense them for a broad public consumption—a public looking for sound-bites and cut-to-the-chase reporting.

I have said all this just to lay a foundation for what I am about to say about the end of an era.

Last Friday I stopped by our local Food Lion with four quarters in my pocket intending to buy a USA Today. This is a paper that I have read almost every weekday for the past 20 years and for the past several years has cost me $5 a week—a price I could easily justify based on my love of print.

Much to my surprise, my four quarters would only cover half of the now two dollar price tag for my morning paper. And in that moment, I saw the end of an era—an era that I have been a part of both mentally and physically. Suffice it to say, my world changed in front of that paper box outside of my local Food Lion store. Ten dollars a week is a lot of money and no doubt will be used to pay my cell phone bill or my insurance premium or heaven knows what.

It was a sad Friday, but perhaps the time spent doing other things instead of browsing the daily paper will lead to my first book being written or learning to play another musical instrument or numerous other activities that I can only imagine at this very moment.

Or, as “they” say: when one door closes there is always another one opening. Hopefully I will be attentive and alert and not look back to often to what I once had. It’s been a good long ride and I am looking forward to what new roads will open up in front of me.

Enjoy yours.

 

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Longing For Closure

Posted on August 19, 2013 by terryhenry2014
As human beings we are hard wired with a desire to finish what we begin. We may not always stop and smell the roses (enjoy the journey) for the sake of getting to the finish line, but we all like the feeling of accomplishment that follows after we have completed a project or specific task.

We also like to have things figured out or at least have a basic understanding of how life works and
why we do the things we do. Yet the older we get and the more wisdom we amass suggests that there are many aspects to life that we will never fully understand.

From a spiritual standpoint, this reality is almost the same. We are told that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Having faith means believing that we can have a fulfilled life even in the midst of trials and tribulations. Having faith means believing that God causes all things to work together for good even when everything around us is sending us the opposite message.

We describe life in terms of “passages” and goals we have accomplished and experiences that we have lived through. Most of us crawled before we walked and graduated high school before going to college and so forth. As each new stage of life or adventure begins, we seek closure for that event or passage that has just ended and been checked off, so to speak.

Closure is partially defined for the sake of this writing as:

a.  a feeling of finality or resolution, especially after a traumatic experience.
b.  a sense of contentment experienced after such a resolution.

I have been thinking a lot about closure as it relates to my life the past several weeks. During this period of time I have come to the conclusion, correct or not, that some of life’s situations will never fully be given closure. In these types of circumstances most of us say that irregardless of what has taken place, we have nonetheless moved on with our lives. We are no longer waiting for a sense of closure but have for the most part determined that our forward movement is more important than holding on to the hope or desire that things will be fixed and/or figured out.

The focus of much of this wandering about is the church I left several years ago amidst some significant differences in vision and leadership issues that never were resolved. During this period of time I felt like I had a target on my back and was literally made to feel like I was a heretic for even questioning the direction of the church or the way it was being governed. I had a lot of company both past and present who had come to some of the same conclusions and ended up, much like them, on the side of the road, wounded and wondering what had happened.

However, my intent today is not to rehash history—rather it is my current attitude towards that organization which is at question.

We have all moved on and that is a fact—we say hello in public and act nice but time has not healed our wounds or provided complete and I would add “substantive” closure. I view this churches progress, and I assume growth, with mixed emotion and have to wonder if this is the same group that couldn’t wait to get rid of me and all the rest that had similar concerns. Did I stay too long? Yes by about two years. Does this add to the amount of my bitterness (almost to harsh a word) and my seeming inability to get past these events and simply “move on” with my life. Probably so. I had such great hopes for this organization to change course during my tenure as elder that I fooled myself into thinking that things were really changing when in fact they were not. 

Perhaps I am writing this in order to let these words soak in and see where they lead me. I don’t want to feel this way about this group for the rest of my life. I would like a knock on my door and to hear the words we are sorry about the way we treated you coming across the threshold. But they have moved on and that scenario is highly unlikely. 

In the process of writing this I have to ask myself the question that is becoming more apparent to me: Does true forgiveness bring real closure? And indeed, there have been times in the past where I thought I did just that only to become aware of this groups activities and feel that sense of betrayal rise up in me and wonder why I haven’t been able to move on.

And maybe it is as simple as that. As simple as taking 6 big boxes of books to a used book store and only getting $11.50 in-store credit for what you thought was worth hundreds. You say thanks, leave them at the door and be glad that they are not taking up anymore space in your life. Besides—you traded them in in order to make room for that grand piano. Just think of all the music and playing time that is coming your way.

Enjoy your ride today: keep it simple and straight forward.






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A Few Random Thoughts For Tuesday

Posted on July 9, 2013 by terryhenry2014

I can’t escape the feeling that my father, who would be 92 today, would still be alive if he had a smartphone to take with him during his visits to the “library”. And when I say library I don’t mean the one where you do research and check out the latest books and magazines. I am talking about that euphemistic place that people of my dad’s generation went to relive themselves of the body’s daily accumulated waste. That’s right—the toilet. 

There are many times I remember my father, newspaper in hand, heading out for what he called the library and not coming out for 15 minutes or more. And many of my friends fathers followed the same pattern. 
I have often wondered about the meaning of all this over the past 40 years. That is until I read an article that told me that many people are taking their smart phones with them into the “library” and spending more time than average behind closed doors.
Conversely, even though I like to read the ingredients of the cereal box while eating breakfast, I have never been able to finish one short article in the bathroom.
My theory is this: had my father possessed a smart phone, he might have spent a lot more time in the “john” and had less time to smoke those little cigars he was so fond of and maybe lived a few more years.
Humour me—it made sense when I first thought about it.
#2 Random Thought.
As the Huge Pepsi Semi passed me at the stoplight this morning on the way to work, I thought: isn’t it ironic that this Huge Company has made billions selling what amounts to flavored, caffeine, sugar water to the world’s population. Maybe we are not as cultured as we would like to think. 
#3 Random Thought
I have just burned through the last of Battle Star Galactica’s 76 episodes on Netflix. It is a fantastic series, uneven at times, but a great story of humanity vs. Cylon vs. humanity, etc. ad finitum. What I learned most is the fact that we make life changing decisions based on many different factors—sometimes on emotion, sometimes on fact, and sometimes on that gut feeling that can often be as wrong as right. Many great discoveries have been made at each and every level.
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The Best For Last?

Posted on June 2, 2013 by terryhenry2014

I sometimes wonder if our children think that we as parents (now grandparents) have saved our best stuff for last. I am pretty sure that at some level my youngest daughter thinks that I do all this cool stuff with the grand babies and that somehow she didn’t get that kind of attention. And while it is true that our kid tricks have gained traction over the years, they each got the best we had to give at the time.

What is true is the fact that we as grandparents can be more relaxed in our relationship with the grand kids in a way that we as parents were not fully capable of.

In Ecclesiastes 1:9 we read that:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

This fact was revealed to me in a new way several weeks ago when I happened onto a TED talk by Kirby Ferguson entitled “Embrace the ReMix”. It is a fascinating concept that seems highly relevant as we enter into the next phase of our corporate/cultural lives. That talk can be found here as an introduction to the full series.

Assuming that you just watched it and are back, I will continue.

When I became a father for the first time I made a commitment to myself that I would not repeat the mistakes in parenting that I believe that my dad had made. He worked a lot and my memory is that after supper he would take a 15 minute power nap, read the paper a while and then head back to work as an accountant for a big manufacturing firm. And while our memories are fickle, I don’t have that many fuzzy feelings about how often he played catch with me in the front yard or gave me what I needed emotionally during my formative years.

It took me several years to finally realize that my dad couldn’t give me what he most likely never received himself. He did the best he could with the limited emotional resources he had at his disposal.

And I guess that is what we as parents pass on to our kids.

By the time I became a father I had been a Christian for a year or so and, unlike my earthly father, was able to rely on His grace and His strength to follow through on some of the promises I had made as regards to parenting and being a husband, etc. In other words, I had a lot of help being more “in-the-moment” than my dad had.

That being said, what my younger daughter doesn’t remember at this point in her life is the fact that I learned a lot of my kid-tricks taking care of her. In addition, we spent more time together than I ever did with her older siblings: She would swing for what seemed like hours in the back yard as I learned to play the mandolin and we sang hymns and folk songs together. We even made up our own verses to “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain” and “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder” although I would be hard pressed to remember any of them at this point.

Anyway, we live and we learn and we learn to live some more. There is more to this line of thinking but It is time to head out to a covered dish.

Enjoy your ride and click the link below for the rest of the story…….

Everything is a Re-Mix

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Summer Memories

Posted on May 28, 2013 by terryhenry2014

It is interesting to note that we never fully leave our past behind—those seminal events linger in grey matter spaces that seem to open up every once and a while and present themselves for minor reviews or introspection.

This morning, for instance, is a blend of present and past realities that seemingly are unrelated except for my minds eye making connections that I am hard pressed to understand and or process.
A long, cold, wet, spring in the mountains of North Carolina has overnight morphed into summer a few weeks before the calendar would tell us it is true. Along with this,  I have been trying diligently for several weeks to get my garden in—often using a space of only a few hours to get the next thing done so that when the next opportunity would arise, I could take advantage of it. Plants I bought on the first of May only found their way into the soil yesterday and I had to stagger planting corn and potatoes with beans and broccoli. 
However, the garden is almost fully planted and I can now move on to other chores such as weeding and fertilizing it so that the fruits of my labor can be realized. 
As I began this thought process a few hours ago I was reminded of two states of being that I have contemplated many times in the past. Sometimes they seem to overlap and sometimes they seem to be mutually exclusive. One state is the writer observing the world and penning his or her thoughts about the process of living—the other is the state of an individual living it on a day by day sort of way.
There is a part of me that takes great joy in observing and making poetic connections about the world that I inhabit. This part is often frustrated by the very fact of having to work for a living and them spending much of my spare time fitting in other necessary activities such as working the garden, mowing the lawn, making time to exercise and taking part in marriage and extended family activities. 
I had a friend back in the day who was a writer. We hung out for a period of time and enjoyed one another’s company. We philosophied and observed, drank beer, ate burgers and took walks. Then he fell in love with a girl that we both knew. During this very brief period, when he was not with her, he was with me and often said that it was a shame that the only way he could experience what was happening in his life was to write it down. I don’t believe at the time I understood what he was trying to communicate by telling me that. 
What I do remember is that his girl friend and I got closer and closer and soon he and I were not friends and I was having the summertime of my life (up to that point). What is weird is I really don’t remember how all that happened or that I was even aware of the fact that my actions might deep six our relationship. I guess I was blinded by living in the moment and not giving a lot of thought to what all that meant. Perhaps I was intoxicated by love and not really able to make rational decisions.
Whatever the reason I thought of this today, the tension between being a part of the moment or experiencing the moment as an observer in order to write about it later and live it more or less vicariously at that point is still something I think about every once in awhile. I guess memories are created either way. I have a lot of pictures left from family events that I don’t appear in because I was the one “preserving” those moments. At some point, the camera was like a rope around my neck that I finally quit carrying because I was always looking for a “shot”. Now with 6 to 8 megapixel cellphone cameras, it is an either or not situation that can be relatively stress-free and you can be in both worlds at the same time.
I guess it all comes down to this: if I wanted to write more I would certainly make time for it and perhaps someday, after my gardening years are past and the grandkids are all grownup, I will carve out some reflective time and really write the next great american novel. 
In the meantime, life is what it is and I am going to enjoy the ride. How about you?
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My Views Are Evolving

Posted on April 19, 2013 by terryhenry2014

I am a firm believer that the process of understanding what we “believe” is an ever evolving sort of thing. A building is raised up piece by piece: it takes months for a house to become a home—a place where people can live and raise a family.

It may seem off point, but I also believe that the art of diplomacy is nearly dead. The chances of two or more people in a group coming to some common conclusions about abortion, gun control or any of the other myriad problems facing society today is almost an impossibility.
That being said, the epiphany that I had today is that the conclusions we reach about what we believe fully depend on where we begin.
In the beginning God created, etc., etc. Male and female He created. The Bible doesn’t say that He created murderers, homosexuals, thieves, adulterers and so on and so forth.
If He didn’t create them, where did they come from: the sin nature within each of us as we are all partakers of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Cain inherited this pre-disposition from Adam and Eve’s actions. God even warned him that evil was lurking and to beware: in other words, he was alerted to the fact that he had a choice in the matter.
The other side of that coin is that people who don’t believe in the Genesis story, but believe in evolution (or something else) are going to come to drastically different conclusions.
Like I said in a previous blog, there is really no such thing as “gun violence” as opposed to just plain old sinful nature being given free reign sort of violence. The young man who took the lives of those kids in Newtown made a bad choice that  day: a choice that I believe only became stronger and stronger the more he thought about it. Sin was crouching at his door and he became a slave to its desires. The devil’s job description is that he has come to steal, kill and destroy: to pit one brother against another.
Guns are legal to possess in America and he choose that weapon to fulfill his desire: most people who own guns, don’t kill innocent people. Abortions are “legal” in America as well. But just because they are legal doesn’t mean they are something that we should avail ourselves of. If you start from where I began, God created these lives and therefore when we end them we are in effect committing murder—whether or not the process is legal or not.
In the beginning we were given free-will by God: His desire was, I believe, that we use this will to choose Him—to walk with Him and talk with Him, in the garden and wherever else we might abide.
After much consideration I have concluded that same sex marriage does not threaten me or my belief in the meaning of marriage in the least. I can agree to uphold their “civil rights” while at the same time not condoning their behavior. Like the story about the wheat and the tares: they both grow up together and we are told not to disturb the one lest we uproot the other—God will take care of it.
We are faced with many choices everyday—some we make wisely and some we don’t. As Christians, we are sinners saved by grace. I can’t blame my poor choices on some kind of genetic marker if I truly have been “born again” and have become a new creation.
What we are faced with in America today is a very complex array of situations. The 3.2 percent of American’s who identify with the LGBT lifestyle have made it their agenda to have the rest of us think that this behavior, this choice, is just an another alternative life style—we just need to accept and recognize them. However, accepting their behavior is not the same as accepting that they too, indeed have civil rights as are given the rest of us by the laws of our land.
Having made that leap, let me also say that I don’t hold out a lot of hope that things are all going to get fixed in the next couple of years or even in my lifetime—or maybe ever. We are going to reap what we have sown long before any judgement comes our way. 
We have already lost a couple of generations to abortion—how many more lives to we have to loose to this tendency towards progressive thought and action.
Maranatha
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