I like L. P.

How much of a man does it take to see his whole life go down,
To look up at the world from a whole in the ground. R. Zimmmerman

My life is very busy now with work. There are so many jobs to do and to price. This is good, the Lord, I believe will help me to organize so that I will prosper. I am beginning to wonder though if I will ever have a wife besides Liz, who I can’t live with or sleep with or talk to about much, but who I still love. God always has loved her and knows her heart. I do not know her heart.

Tomorrow the Junior High Kids are going to paint the downstairs of the Lighthouse.

India Ink

I have been one acquainted with the night,
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Another long busy day at work. I had to make myself walk after being on the phone for 2 hours. There will not be many more trips to the beach now that it is dark so soon after I get home. Instead I walk down Saint George street and Cove street and back on Lover’s lane, stopping by the landing off of Cove Street to look East across the Back river to the Beach. Tonight was a dark moonless night with the Milky Way clearly visible, Mars the brightest object in the sky, the Pleiades rising, a bird sounded a ghostly trilling by the edge of the marsh. I wonder what other, more silent creatures are lurking. One evening on this route I passed close to a large coyote walking in the other direction about twenty feet off the road. I looked right at him, he looked back and calmly walked on.

Entrapment

Last night I watched a movie I got from the Library called Entrapment that stars Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It was an entertaining movie with pretty good action and suspense. The most remarkable thing about this movie is Catherine Zeta-Jones. My thought on watching her was, “God you created the sun and the moon and the heavens, but she is your masterpiece”. She is something to see and see and see. The plot is decent, the character development is non-existent; there is no realistic psychology to either of the main characters Sean Connery or Catherine Zeta-Jones. It is not a great movie but it is good entertainment.

Routine Day of Rest

There was a sliver of a new moon in the western sky last night. Today the tide is one of the highest I’ve ever seen, it is within inches of the road and over the road in places on King Caesar and below the Bluefish River bridge. It was up beyond the access ramp on the main beach. Long fingers of fog drifted over the bay and the marshes. There was a cormorant by the middle of the bridge. I got a close look at it. They are odd birds that fly low, float half submerged and swim better than fish.

City of Angels

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

I had an interesting conversation today with the woman who has hired me to put new windows in her house. She told me how she met her husband. He was 35 she was 22, I estimate from some of the facts she gave; he had been married at 26 for several years, then divorced in a situation much like mine, then he was alone for 6 years. She said she kept dropping hints that she was interested in him but he did not respond. Exasperated, she finally had to ask him out. It is interesting to me to see that an interesting and attractive woman pursued a relationship with an older man. Isn’t that how it was in the beginning, God brought the woman to the man? He didn’t have to go in pursuit of a wife; in fact, the bible says not to seek a wife. He had a bad marriage and then a good marriage. From what I can tell it is a good marriage, they have been married long enough to have 3 daughters, two of them college age, one in high school. She doesn’t work but she has been able to make quite a bit of money by remodeling the homes they owned, his career has required quite a few moves and each time they have profited on the sale of their house. I should say that this woman is quite beautiful. (Like Mrs. H who is also married to an older man and has daughters). The daughters are like their Mom, tall, long-haired and beautiful. We talked for almost an hour when I stopped for coffee. She is intelligent, sensual and married, with an underline on the married part. I think she must be a little lonely.

Unresolved Issues

El tiempo descubridor de todas las cosas.


Hell does not seem fair to me in the sense that a person is punished for eternity for crimes that were finite, no matter how bad. Can one perhaps be saved after death? I know that Hell is in the bible but there is more in the bible than can be reduced to up and down theology. There will be a judgment day and there are people who willfully reject God and those who earnestly seek him.

People believe strange things, some of which result in mass suffering. The social group defines its own reality. I do not believe however, that truth or right and wrong are relative to the social group, I believe that they are absolute.

My world view is distinctly different from anyone else’s. I am anti-materialistic, and anti-war, but not anti-self defense. I have become cynical about big government, big media and big business. I am anti-authoritarian even though the bible says to obey the authorities, “they are God’s ministers to you for good”. The reality that I see is that the government is an ass, that we are drowning in a sea of lies, and that many godly men and women believe those lies.

I believe the bible, although I do not claim to understand or be able to interpret it all, and I believe in Jesus Christ; he is the ultimate and ultimately the only reality.

I believe that God is love and that men are sinners turned away from God.

I believe in eternal life, but it was not why I came to Christ. I came to Christ because I had a revelation that there was perfect love and that only God could be capable of perfect and unconditional love.

I believe that God exists and that he is involved in the intimate details of my life, that he is all good and that he cares for me and has a plan for me. But when things go bad, I am discouraged and have no joy in my faith, but then it is my faith that has failed.

Sunday

A cool wind, hot sun, low tide in the early afternoon. It’s the first day of Autumn and it feels it. I passed by K on the way through the parking lot, she was in a hurry to get to the porta-potty so I didn’t get to talk to her.

Tomorrow is L’s fiftieth birthday but she is celebrating it today by making a roast beef dinner with S and me and her parents invited.

I enjoyed Sunday school today teaching the junior high class.

The sermon was by Dr. Gary Morris and was about Noah and his three sons, about Noah’s lapse of character and one son’s delight in the scandal while the other two tried to cover him up. Dr. Morris is a PhD. who is well versed in the creation-evolution controversy. He is an young earth creationist, in other words he believes that the world is only 6000 years old, taking the book of Genesis literally concerning the flood and its affects on the earth and the history of mankind.
I lean toward the old earth creationist view point. I find the 4 billion year age of the earth to be plausible and perhaps indicated by the evidence. I also find the scientific evidence for a world wide flood to be rather thin or non-existent. But what do we do with all those lost generations and civilizations if man has really been around for one million years? 6000 years is a number that I can conceive of in my own terms, one million years is beyond my perspective and, from that standpoint, it is troubling. Evolution, however, I reject on a scientific and a biblical basis. In the final analysis, the bible, God’s word, and science, the study of God’s creation will be found to agree.

Pleasant dinner with L and family in spite of divorce in process.

Immanuel

Yo no digo esta cancion
Sino a quien conmigo va.

We worked at S’s house today shingling the roof. It was a beautiful, clear, sunny day to work outside. We started to clean up early about 3:30 when S invited us in to coffee. She loves to sit down and talk with us, Tim P, Mike B and me. Her husband D was working on the computer in the next room. She brought out her old family pictures which she kept loose in a box and began to show them to us. I have known most of her family since I first met her in 1978, meeting her brothers and sisters each almost independently. There is a strange relationship between her and I which I do not completely understand. She seems affectionate towards me and open about herself in a way she was not in the past.

The beach after work was glorious and breathtaking. The wind was off shore and driving the surf into the broad flat sand beach, it was dead low tide. I could see the tower in Provincetown. The clouds were spectacular whisps of white like abstract strokes of the most gleeful and majestic artist. I saw Cathy C head down the beach in her pink shorts and baseball cap; she runs every evening to Green Harbor and back. Another jogger, came towards me on the beach. She also was glorious and breathtaking; she stopped about where I was standing looking out to sea and turned up towards the parking lot.


Some more of my favorite websites are:

Information Clearing House

Naughty Bits

Riding with the Moon
Men and women towards each other are for the eyes, and for the heart, and not only for the bed. Tuareg proverb
-from Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks

I went to prayer meeting tonight on my bicycle. My son had taken my truck for the day so I had an excuse to ride my bike wherever I went just like the old days when I disdained automobiles and rode for miles. Coming back in the near dark, the moon was shining on my right as I came up Bay Road to Halls Corner. It is like flying, to ride propelled by muscle power and gravity alone out in the open wind with the moon floating next to you. In the old days when I was young I would ride at night by the light of the sky and the shadows of the trees over my head, I could not see the road itself unless a car came from behind illuminating everything below my wheels so that I could see to pull over out of the way.

Baghdad Burning

Greetings

No one has ever seen God, but God, the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known. John 1:18

I hope you will understand that although many things happened today, I have little to say about any of it.

Work, Peace and War

That is the story of how I became a Christian. It is basically in three parts, and, to this day, my faith rest on these three immutable legs: One, that God is perfect love; because human love is mixed with fear, we fail to love our brother and we fail the ones we love. Two, God calls us to follow him by his Holy Spirit; he calls us to live by faith, believing in God and acting as if he is always present without seeing him. Three; Jesus Christ is God incarnate; his death pays for our sin and his resurrection destroys the power of death for those who believe.

I continue to work each day starting early on paper work, and then off to one of many carpentry jobs in progress. Then home where I make dinner and eat with my son. He is the greatest blessing of my life. Then a little time reading on the internet, then phone calls, job journals, estimates, proposals etc. Generally all is well, I have my health, my bills paid, my son at home, a roof over my head. I'd like to have a home of my own and a wife, but I can't complain. I've learned not to expect too much from this life. The future remains entirely a mystery, the past an enigma. I have my hopes, my dreams, my hobbies, I'd like to write a book, perhaps I will, perhaps I will find another wife. I feel that God has called me, at least to know the message of the Gospel, a treasure in an earthen vessel, for the moment on the shelf.

I am beginning to believe that Bush is not competent to be president. He failed to take measures to stop the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He failed to find Bin Laden. He failed to establish a stable government in Afghanistan. He has run the federal deficit further into the red than it has ever been. He failed to anticipate the consequences of going to war in Iraq. His policies have cost American lives and treasure without any clear objectives.

The beach was beautiful just after sunset, after a cool, cloudy day. There was a steady, warm wind from the southeast and a bright, perfect half moon.

Labor Day

Emprenate del aire y pariras el viento

At the beach about sunset, cloudy, spitting rain, I talked to DC and his Mom. She was out jogging. About a quarter mile off shore there was a flack of small birds milling about. They looked like terns. There have been almost no terns on this beach in three years. Previously it was common to see them fishing in flocks all around the bay and out to the ocean. Their departure was blamed on foxes; but I think it may have been the increase in SUV permits that put a small army of 4 wheelers along the edge of their nesting ground.