Friday, December 7, 2018

The Exit and a Christmas Blessing

In a movie theatre it is the first thing you look for. In the opulent theaters of Hollywoods’s golden age, They were gilded caged letters softly glowing in the murky smoky drone of the on going picture. ‘Exit’ . Sooner or later, we use it. There is no intermission and there is no avoiding it. It is difficult living with a chronic condition. You go as if nothing is wrong and all is okay until another event tells you that there is no escaping it. The ironic blessing is that those with conditions that signal an exit, know full well the preciousness and brevity of our walk on this earth. When they come, you take the medicine  say a prayer for a positive outcome but ultimately you never know the outcome. Will the futile  medicine work to stave off the condition or are these the last hours? Frankly you never know. This is when you know your faith. At that time, the vapor of life hangs in the air and you see how fragile it is. It is a gossamer web lilting in  a slight breeze. It is in that moment you realize that the wife sleeping beside you may not see you as you are at that moment ever again. So you pray and you hope. 

We go on our busyness of each day with its own troubles and highs and lows but in the backdrop just off stage, there is a looming senes of life’s brevity. This is when thoughts fly not to one’s self and what is ahead but the memories flood in on you and it is in that moment you realize the fullness of life that have been lived. You see and feel in those moments the love and exhilaration of a kiss, a hug, a laugh and a cry. The times that you prayed when you were desperate for an answer. Funny thing is that though thoughts and memories do not focus around what you did, what you achieved, or even what you failed at in your life. Your remember the softness of baby hair, the smell of lotion on a freshly changed son. The taste of a kiss from a new bride and a dance with a daughter at her wedding. The children’s laughter comes flooding in and it is then you realized that you not only held love in your hands but you touched it and tasted it. This is what I remember about my life most of all. It has been a good one in my estimation. I think we all feel that we have lived several lives and I do not think it is uncommon to think that. I guess the question I have for you is what do you remember at those times when the vapor of life seems so fragile. For those of faith it is not fear — it really isn’t. It is about a life lived and the good things the Lord has allowed you to experience. It is about moving to new places in your heart in mind. It s about holding no malice or ill will because in those times there is no place for that. It is said in the Old Testament that the  word for death  translates as gathering. It is not a harsh and dark thing, it is much akin to when Jesus looked at Jerusalem and mourned His rejection from them. He sought to gather them and in that sense I do the same. I look at those who have rejected me, all of them and the only emotion I can muster is far from anger, it is a feeling of what might of been and what could have been shared between them and me. That is what I think about. 

So I say this Holiday Season to those who think ill of me, please know I do not think ill of you. I understand that you are doing what you think is best for you and yours. I get that. I wish you nothing  but peace and rich love from all that is in your fleeting life. At Christmas time many put candles in the window to signify that the Mother with Child and the Young Husband are welcome within. There was no room for them in Bethlehem so they did the best they could and God met them there. So I put a  candle in the window in hope, a hope I will never lose because it if based on love for true love hopes all things. 

Merry Christmas to all I have wronged please forgive me and do not count it to my ledger. Believe me I have put enough there for the both of us. I hope you can forgive as I have forgiven you. This is the instructions of our Lord because He most of all understood the weight and baggage we carry around with us. Let it go, reach out and know a hand will be there to grasp yours and there will not be anything but love felt between us. 


Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Rocky Ground.



It is time to look again at what we are doing. What is our goal and what exactly are our lives producing. We follow and we lead but is the path shining brighter or does the way grow darker? This takes courage to answer honestly in a dysfunctional religious group.  

With such a heavy subject,let's lighten it a bit with some rock n' roll from Bruce Springsteen:

"We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground

Rise up shepherd, rise up
Your flock has roamed far from the hills
The stars have faded, the sky is still
The angels are shouting ,Glory Hallelujah"


Perhaps, it is time to take inventory. Here are some additional questions for you to ask:

  • Given the importance and gravity of your choices, are you sure you are correct in all the actions you have taken—with the damage and pain your choices may have caused to others, this is a very important question.
  • Is what you have lost worth the value of what you have believed you have gained?
  • What is the general state of your mind? In  other words, What emotions dominate you feelings of: Peace, Happiness, Anger, Fear, Loathing, Depression? Do emotions have any real presence at all or do you go through life numb?
  • When was the last time you have taken real initiative in a decision?
  • How long has it been since you have seen the people you allege to care about and love? Is your relationship to them in anyway impacted by your decisions regarding the group to wit you have attached yourself.

What do you really resonate in your deepest self on these topics?


If in any sense, there is an un-comfortability regarding any of these questions, chances are you are repressing them and have decided to defer them to ones who really cannot make them and those that will not fully answer for your lack of addressing them. That is what children do not men and women. Time to put your big boy pants on and do some real hard looking at where you are bound.


"Forty days and nights of rain have washed this land
Jesus said the money changers in this temple will not stand
Find your flock, get them to higher ground
Flood waters rising and we're Caanan bound

We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground"


There is an old maxim: ‘work will fill up any slack time you have’ In other words, if you do not control what goes into your life and what you expend effort on, someone else will do it for you. In a dysfunctional religious group, this is standard operating procedure. What is their deception? To gild their imposed activity as Godly when the modus operandi is to keep you distracted from all the questions above. This is especially true from anyone who is under that age of 45. Why? There is much to do, work, raise and educate children, buy houses and all the while, life, real life slips away. One day you wake to raised children who are not so certain you really knew what you were doing. 
You find the relationships that should have been present are only memories and yet the temptation is to work harder and press further on the familiar path of entropy and fatigue. All the while the steps grow higher and the way that seemed within reach last year must be postponed two or three. Carrots are thrown to keep you focused in what should not be your priority. And your service to God lies in worse state than it did perhaps ten years prior. 

"Tend to your flock or they will stray
We'll be called for our service come Judgment Day
Before we cross that river wide
Blood on our hands will come back on us twice
Rise up shepherd, rise up
Your flock has roamed far from the hills
Stars have faded, the sky is still
Sun's in the heavens and a new day's rising"

Time for a pause: How would you assess your relationship to God? Is your quiet time a struggle and in your prayers does all seem hollow and no one seems to be listening.  You become and enforce being a creature of habit and deferment of your very lives to people who say they care but in essence one slip from you reveals their true nature…they are not with you, they are using you.

"You use your muscle and your mind and you pray your best
That your best is good enough, the Lord will do the rest
You raise your children and you teach 'them to walk straight and sure
You pray that hard times, hard times, come no more
You try to sleep, you toss and turn, the bottom's dropping out
Where you once had faith now there's only doubt
You pray for guidance, only silence now meets your prayers
The morning breaks, you awake but no one's there"

Don’t repress this thought and throw it out because it smacks of deception. I am asking you point blank to address it. It is easy to throw out truth as easy as deception. Think for yourself. Look at the Rocky Ground. You have sowed for years into it. Does it reap anything else than what you were promised or expected? If so, look at it because it is a prophecy for what will be for the future…unless you change it.

All I know is if one does not take responsibility for their lives and where they are going, they are not realizing their potential and if I might say so, their God-given right of self-determination. In other words, their Freedom. If you have done that, then the place you are living is a prison and in your heart you know what I say rings and resonates deep. I know, I had that feeling for the years I was on the wrong path and yet allowed myself to put off my decision – thinking the Lord will change it. I have a question for you in a lesson:

Jeremiah was a young man to whom God sent his word to a heretical nation. He was repressed and imprisoned and left for dead. When the Kings would come to him, he never wavered in what he said. So what was that message? “God will not relent of the destruction He will wreak. The people follow their own vision and their leaders have become hirelings. There is judgment coming and cannot be stopped”. What does your heart tell you? Do you trust yourself enough to value that? If not, they have already brought you in chains. As Jesus would say ‘Blind guides, leading the blind – they are whitwashed sepulchers full of dead man’s bones..’

Here is a thought: God seems to not think in years but in generations. Sea-changes happen in the passing of generations. How is your leadership set up? Has the line of succession now become  a question? Remember most movements historically fizzle after the passing of the founder. This is a precedent of history. How different from those movements that have remained after 100+ years compare with the teachings of your group? This indeed is a tell.

In my life, I ignored the Rocky Ground and got used to the pain and fatigue believing the lie that it was all for God when it was not for Him at all.

In the end you lose anyway. That is the reality, you cannot sow your life into something and not reap its fruit. You are only prolonging loss and when the time is expended and your fifty and the kids are grown, you will be alone with your thoughts, you will remember the people and voices now but memory. The photos if you have any are only ghosts that stare back at you to perhaps a time when you were a real person before you gave yourself to what you allowed to be imposed on you. You have lost it all. At that time standing on a vacant land and it will still be Rocky Ground.
There is time to change. There is time to take charge there is time to silence the voices that leech the very life from you and your family.

There is only one Life don’t let someone live it for you…look at the ground on which your life and your wife and children stand on? Do you wish what you are feeling on them? If you do not change, you have damned them to such a life. 

On the bright side, there is still time. You can change, you can do it. There is a new day coming. There is love you have forgotten but it has not forgotten. Muster your strength the journey is not long at all. You know they way back home. 


"We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground
There's a new day coming
We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground
(I'm a soldier!)
                       Bruce Springsteen. 

Monday, June 4, 2018

Kodachrome

There is no more. There will never be again. Kodak stopped making the paper and supplies to produce ‘real’ photographs where light and nature reveal the nuances a computer never could. It was life captured and preserved. It was light captured as it reflected upon an immeasurable amount of faces, places, events and feelings. They evoke memories and even the sense one felt at the time of the click or snap. They are all there in the closet or the attic telling their stories of lives unfolding all set silently away and waiting to be remembered.

We put them up for another time. We put them up weeping for the loss of what is from the time of plenty when time stood still in those snapshots of Vicki’s and my life. We put them up in hope that they would be taken down, relived, and remembered. At some dark moments in all the moves I made, I was tempted to leave them almost in spite of those who no longer live in our presence. I wanted to forget as they had. They had moved on so why shouldn’t I. They no longer look back but ‘press on’ as their leader puts it. For them there is no looking back or perhaps not even remorse or regret. Honestly I don’t know. We are jettisoned from their lives and left to float in and out of the flotsam and jetsam of their random memory only to be quelled by stone cold scripture. Their hearts once alive now as flat and lifeless as the frames caught and stowed away in my attic. If that is not hell I don’t know what is. What they see as now dead is still very much alive. What they think is gone is just out of the view of their horizon. The world is not flat and discrete and exploring the boundaries of faith will not lead to the edge of a world where the precipice of nothingness awaits. No, the world is a circle and wraps upon itself. As does our faith and even our God. Life is not a straight line. I have come to know this. It is a bending arc where what once was comes around again for a second view in most cases. In fact, I would question a person’s genuineness if they said life is a straight line, no turning back but just a presumption to the point of truculence pacing forward believing they are getting ever closer to a God they will never really know. Why? The very walk they possess denies that.

They leave a gaping void that can only be filled by what they now eschew. How do I know this? I know this because the Kodachrome lives and breathes. It is not flat and dead but has a dimension only witnessed when the holder takes it from the dusty hot box flips it and gazes into what was. The smile crinkles and the eye lights up and there is life again. There is life in the Kodachrome. I have personally seen it. It is ironic that the last move I did was recent and the exercise of taking huge amounts of pictures stored in the attic down and into the moving van wondering why I bothered…who was there to see them? Who would care about them beside me and my wife? The Kodachrome is like love, it only has value when it is shared. There was no love left…at least from that other side so I thought. Then a miracle happened. Life circled back on itself and some who were lost to us were regained. Needless to say the Christmas pictures this year were perhaps the most valuable of our collection. They told a story of restoration, reconciliation and redemption…you know… the main motives of Jesus our Lord toward all the human race who reflected the heart of the Father. What was once lost was now found. The coin lost was regained and oh the joy and celebration that incurred that holiday. Yes, the Kodachrome lives and waits. It waited ten years silently. Put away for a time when they would be taken out and all the gushes of life relived. That happened about a month ago. My daughter who was lost to us for ten years to a dysfunctional religious group returned to us. What was on her mind and a main desire of her coming to see us? Well us of course but then there was the Kodachrome. She wanted to see and go through them all box by box. If you are anything like me and my wife there were thousands to go through. Yet my daughter spent hours upon hours looking at them, picking some treasures to take with her back to her family. Treasures they were. In her hand life sparked once again, a memory returned and a smile or tear came welling up. I have seen miracles but never as so special and yet as commonplace as a memory recovered. It whispers life and causes bone to connect to bone and sinew to sinew. It makes what was once a valley of dry bones live. We are not the ogres we are made out to be by some. We are just people. In that time I saw pictures of Gran holding my son for the first time. Me dusting the bottom of my daughter with baby powder when she was a few months old. The joy of both inexplicable and unfathomable. Looking as the Kodachrome we see what really was and is. These are the things that last and it is these that reset our forever wandering reference point when it is set by others. This is the chief crime of the group they are in. Their reality is not real. It will never be real. In those pictures love is steadfast because…well…because it is. It needs no analysis or even understanding we don’t love based on condition nor on performance or success or failure. We love because we do – the Kodachrome does not lie when even we can lie to ourselves. So go ahead and throw up an ever failing façade that needs constant shoring up – so much effort to change what cannot be changed. There is no escape from the Kodachrome.
So they still wait, they are put away in hope --this Kodachrome of ours-- awaiting the circle to complete and the dry bones to hear the prophecy they speak silently and to see life return again. We wait too. My wife and daughter and her family and I. We wait knowing now the power of the Kodachrome when what was becomes what is.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

The God of Circles


I am amazed when I read the stories of so many in the Bible. I see circles. It is the geometric that reflects the very nature of God, complete, no beginning and no end.  If you think about it there is a circular pattern in most of nature:  the circular pattern as the moon orbits around us and the earth around the sun, the waves of a drop of water in a still pond, sound waves, water in a weightless space. Even the planet is a circle in three dimensional space.  Then I ask myself what I really see when I see the circle. I am tempted to look at the empty void between the rims of that perfect patterned circle.  It is fitting a proper to look at all of it: the circle itself and the void inside. If you think of it, time itself bends in a circular fashion. Why? God’s will is circular with us in a random fashion arcing towards the perfect. Let me give you a few examples.

I. A man, a Son , a Widow and their Circles

Abraham- this story of Abraham is a circle. God led him to a promised land where he dwelt with his nephew Lot. He entered the land and set up an altar to His God who had brought him to this land with so much ahead of him. In time, there was a famine in the land and Abraham went to Egypt. While it is not mentioned as this being  ‘out of God’s plan’, if we read through the lines, Abraham went through much tribulation in that land yet in spite of all that was he not only blessed but upon his forced return to his inheritance, he re-entered the land by that same path and rebuilt the altar no doubt in disarray from time. He rebuilt it and with each stone replaced, it confirmed the will of God of him being there in the land – moving long the rim of God’s will. You see, we cannot break through that circle only dwell within its view and follow it or labor in the bleak expanse within the circle. Think of it for a moment. The very ground he had first entered the land was being trod as he re-entered. The circle was complete. While it is never said, I believe this was the bedrock of Abraham’s faith as he raised the knife to strike his son in God’s name only to hear the bleating a split second later in the thicket. He saw the silver rim of God’s will from the void he had walked through to Mount Moriah. He had walked void before. In the end, again God had taken and given back but even more. If we find ourselves in the void,  we must be like Abraham and seek the arcing of the rim of the God of circles. Life is full of the void, the in-between time while we approach the golden rim once more.

Joseph – also a circle: favored son of an old man betrayed, beaten and sold as a slave. The dark days did not end but increased as a young man imprisoned and where he learned to survive in the void between the circle’s arcs. Yet the very place of prison where he was became the launching point for perhaps one of the greatest in the history of man. Saving a nation but even more he saved his own kin from a slow waning death from starvation. In the end through the throes and eddies of all that story, he wept with his brothers. From the void, he saw his father in the distance and ran to him kissed him. The rim of the circle was found as he embraced his father. I am reading between the lines here but I believe that what Jacob saw was not the time that had passed. We do not remember the void when we have found the rim of God. All the pain and anguish and long sleepless nights of mourning are washed away in such a place as against the rim. Joseph’s life was two points that were on the circle with so much void in between. It was not the void that was important to Joseph, it was the path back to the rim and to His father experiencing the full circle of the joy that leaped within his heart.

Naomi – a circular life. She was the wife of a man named Elimelech who determined like Abraham his forefather had done before him to leave the land of his inheritance because of famine. His outcome was not a favorable as Abraham’s. He died as well as his sons in a strange land leaving his wife and two daughters-in-law alone and unprotected. No doubt  Naomi purposed to go back to the land of her family hoping to find some support and shelter from relatives—as Abraham, there was little choice: she had to return to the place where she had departed.  All hope of the family line was gone.--Her husband and sons dead. That was the void that she walked along with her one loyal and loving daughter-in-law Ruth.   All her children were taken, her hope and her inheritance flown to the wind never to return.  Upon the return, it was not her who could be used by God to bring about change. She had given up and renamed herself according to her plight. Her name now meant bitter( Mara). Life was now a slow poison that had taken hold and was petrifying her one cell at a time. Yet in the void so dark she could not even see the rim of God’s will, that perfect circle, Ruth was now leading her. Ruth: the future wife of Boaz mother to Obed the grandfather of David the King.  On the rim now, Naomi dandled her grandson on her knee. I think of the roads of the void on the way back and what she must have felt – if anything at all. Pain at that level makes you numb. There is no more feeling there is only a twisted dance where Death is the leading partner. Yet back on the rim of God, the pain was forgotten. There was only the present and a future with a family. It was as if the past was washed under by all the love of the present. What she longed for she had found and all the pain a distant memory as she dandled the flubbery bundle of joy that represented God’s unbroken promise that she had either not believed or had forgotten about. Her circle was now completed. She was on the rim to stay.

II. There is no map, only a straight line

I tell you these stories so that it might encourage you that wherever you are, you are within the boundary of God’s will. Like I said, it cannot be breached and there is no escape from it. There is only the void between. Here are some suggestions from a void-dweller. We cannot see in the void but the only thing to do is try to move in a straight line. It is not about trust or faith at that point because like Naomi some of us are beyond that possibility. No, we move for survival or just to function. We become forward moving machines with all else drained from us. But there is a current and perhaps even a force that directs us in a straight line so we do not get lost in the void between the rims of the circle of God’s will. I am sure there is because where I am today is not where I was just a short few years ago. We continue to push through the void in a straight line. We had faith, lost faith and somehow had it given back to us. Maybe our story is yours in some way. Maybe you walk through your own wasteland and see no shimmering ring at all. My advice is to keep moving even when there is nothing to move for or towards. Keep moving and you will eventually find yourself where you can be nothing but surprised. Perhaps a land recaptured, a family rebuilt or a long awaited reconciliation. You see, circles are all about that. They begin and end in the same place and we are bound by the boundaries of the circle of God’s will. The comforting thing is no one walks the rim continuously with no veering except  One. We are bound to a life in the void at worst or skipping along the rim from time to time at best. It is the nature of life. But be comforted because in any direction you walk within the circle of the will of God and no matter how far you are from it, if you keep walking you will eventually find it. The most interesting thing is it will be exactly the point where perhaps you left it. Like Abraham, Joseph and Naomi. How we can walk in a straight line and end up where we began can only be God. My son and daughter with their families are in the void. I know this because I am one who has been a void dweller. I know that where there are  discrete breaks in fellowship and unity, there is  not the will of God. This is proven by the fruit produced: in the void, one’s love for anything grows cold and one goes into survival mode – one becomes ruthless. Although they try or seek to emulate their leaders, my son and daughter will never be that. To them I say: the way out is straight but not easy. It is easiest to become a dweller and quiet the yearning to see what one cannot see in the void – the shimmering rim of the will of God where there is only love, forgiveness and a continuity of life as if one had never left the rim. Oh there are cities in the void-- large and prosperous ones-- but they are not the city of God.  One must follow their heart not the words or whispers who say ‘Stay’.  There is much in that place along the rim and it is everything you hoped it would be. Keep walking…along the rim we are waiting.




Sunday, March 25, 2018

The Unbroken Cord


It is never broken, it never fatigues. I had a very dear friend pass away last year. She died of cancer. We were living in another state and on our visits, it was hard to see the stages take hold physically. She was who she always was but on each visit, a little step down a little more pain reflected in the eyes of her husband , newly adopted son and daughters. It was a quiet and peaceful exit and while it tore at us all, it was peace we knew she had entered.  I used to think that when one got on the other side that the battle was over and the victory won. I don’t think that anymore. They all look back. They remember us as much as we remember them. They see the Presence we all long to see. They do not grow weary like we do. They know the outcome. They know the importance of prayer. They see their words, the words of us all burning as incense before the Throne and the glass sea. They smell the fragrance of prayer like we cannot. They know prayer is more than words there. They know that it has a fragrance, it has body by its wafting before the great I Am. So what is it they do? Their most important work: they worship and they pray. What do they pray about? Us. Their thoughts are of Him…and us. Of this I have no doubt. It is my conviction that there is not a separation in the body terrestrial and celestial. The Bible clearly teaches that the body of Christ is not separated into parts. Some part is here while some is there. You see what binds us together is not time or space. It is a force greater than any dimension and how we measure things this side of eternity. It is love. It is love that binds us. It is love that causes us to look forward and for them to look back to urge us on and to pray for us.

About What? 

When I say they pray, I guess the normal question to ask is ‘About what?’ There is total recall. They see us as we were and I believe as we are and will be. The pain they feel there is not their own, it is our pain. And they join in unison with the Power, the Son of God and intercede and supplicate. They bring us constantly before the Throne. They have gone ahead and their service is more powerful than any earthly power. Their faith is now perfected and focused. On what? Us. I have a personal belief that loved ones that have gone before us pray and I always gave that lip service. But one thing I know now I did not know then. People pray for me and my family and those that love you who have gone on do too.

Our Arc back to God's will

All these thoughts give me incentive to believe and to continue to pray. Heck, there is not a day that I do not think of my kids and when I do I lift my thoughts about them heavenward.  I know that I am a passing thought at times to them. I am a marker in their lives and nothing more. They have moved on and gotten so busy with the industry dysfunctional groups so often exude. How do I know? I did. The thing to understand in this particular group is the strategy to do just that. There is no time left to think about anything else. In this place church is a focus and there is a school that requires parents to support the school with time. That is not a bad thing at all but when there are hours of homework, church attendance and school support there is little time left to do much else. Life becomes a routine focused not on family (although they tell you it is) but on the church. It is justified by the group in that it is service to God. I guess in a way it is but I can’t help but think it is more than that and borders on worshipping the church. If it weren’t for the silver thread of prayer that ties us together, there would be nothing else. Fortunately that is the most powerful of cords because they are made of sheared love. The cord is frayed but still holds and always will because it is built on nothing but love. They have been conditioned not to love us, but ours is unconditional. It cannot be struck down or cut off. The fact is we will always be there and no power on earth or heaven will change that. When my daughter and her family came back into our lives after leaving the group, I have seen suspicion and mistrust slough off like another skin. They are who they used to be but much wiser. So we go on together now. There is not  a morning where my wife does not get a call or make one. A few weeks ago, my daughter came to stay with us for a few days. In that time, she reviewed for hours all the pictures we had boxed up. My three children were spread through all of them (what else do we take pictures for? ). It was a swirl of emotion. Prom, football, basketball, holidays, birthdays,  smiles, laughter and silliness. I believe she wanted to re-connect to the past and that was the portal for it. They all were waiting for her. We had carefully put them away in faith hoping for a day that finally occurred for one of my children. They will be there for the others. They wait. They are snapshot prayers, each one and represent the thoughts my wife and I have had over the years of separation. They have pulled away but we have gotten closer. That is the unique thing about love. It is in the separation and even neglect it flourishes. It is not based on conditions, it is not based on time or contact. It is based and seated in the connections that blood makes. They are who they are. We used to hear from the pulpit that fact denigrated and eschewed. The leader would grimace as they used the phrase 'Well, that's just the way I am' as a slight and an unaccepted condition before God. What a path to judgement that the leader has built for himself. It is a lie and even perhaps an affront to God Himself to believe such and if the truth be told a form of self-hatred. I wonder what in life made them think this way. Really as I look back I have pity. I have never met someone with so much  self-loathing the they built an entire life on changing the unchangeable. God's personal design of each of us.

The Obscure Altar, Our Arcing back to the Will of God

 Early I said I was a marker. I would like to change that thought. You know when Abraham journeyed out of the promised land into Egypt for a time due to conditions beyond their control (I believe my children still can relate to that), when he returned, he came to the Oaks of Mamre where he had previously entered the land God was to give him as an inheritance. There he built an altar to remember his entry and his re-entry into God’s will to which he had arced and finally returned. God was there waiting on Abraham's return. No, I am not a marker, I would say I am an altar meant to stand as a monument and an entry point back into the life of joy and laughter they once knew and had replaced with the grayness of religious effort. God is waiting there along with all of us on their return and we always will. My wife and I stand here (and now our daughter and her family) , we never tire of standing there through strength to weakness to death. We will always pray and wait this side and on the other side. There is no stronger bond than family no matter what others may say. Dysfunctional Religious groups can deny that but it is a hollow lie.

So we pray. We know others pray. We grow stronger while all that divides us dissipates like a vapor because it is not based on the one cord that cannot be broken….Love.
P.S. this is my 100th blog entry!