A squirrel was on my balcony around seven. I really don’t know how it got there, I imagine it leaped from a nearby beam. The first squirrel to come since the pines came down. In fact, the whole area seemed filled with wildlife. A coyote wandered up the driveway, staring at me as it walked past. I stared back, and asked what it was up to. Ravens, two of them were circling all around, flying fairly close, landing in nearby trees, pecking at the tops of pines, rummaging around in the branches of budding oaks. Birds continued to sing, all types. Now it is night, and the area seems more filled with visitors than normal, enough to make me wonder whether this is a holiday. I don’t think it is.
I am tired now, more tired than I have been at this hour in a while, my mind and body a little weary from exertion, which is a welcomed kind of weary.
Funny thing this writing is, for always, my whole life, I’ve never been able to succesfully write after three in the afternoon. The evening is when I am more social, the morning is when my mind is on fire. I would never even try to write. Yet, here I do. Now, I ‘m not sure if maybe I shouldn’t in fact be writing at this hour, if my mental meanderings make sense. It is a good habit, and maybe this hour is not a time for focus, but it is a time for openness, as if my fingers go to work without conferring with my mind, letting out thoughts and feelings.
Nothing remains in either place tonight, only the continued quest to do what I can, and do that which is before me. This was a weird week, a week in which I shifted somehow, had to wander through some decisions I didn’t know I was making, having to come to terms with that which became overburdensome. It was a week in which a marker made me pause and consider all that is going on, and where it is going. Somehow, even without specifics, I feel like conclusions were reached, insight gained. Only it was not a marker of my maturity. I stumbled along all the way, and feel more of where I should be, than contentment of where I am.
So, I keep on, waiting for my heart to be ‘strangely warmed’, for the door to open, to what I don’t know, only I know it remains to be opened. For years I’ve been hearing ‘wait’, and I don’t know why. But, I do wait.
Some people I know have gotten a bit into the gambling scene. Nothing extreme, no worries on my part, but enough to make points of conversation that I don’t identify with. Gambling has no attraction. The times I’ve been to Vegas I’ve never been tempted to bet on anything, even a slot machine, not because of moral issues, because of interest issues. I’m completely uninterested in it. Now here is why I bring this up. Gambling with cards or in other ways doesn’t have interested because I’m in the middle of the highest stakes a person can gamble with, I’m laying my whole life down there on the table, and trusting the spin to come up my way. More than this, I’m taking what I say I believe, and committting to it, having now left little room to back out. I’m betting on myself, and what God is doing in me, and the stakes are my whole existence. What does the thrill of getting a high hand compare with that?
That’s why I think I’ve no interest in the usual kind of gambling. It bores me, for the stakes with that is just money. Bet a life, bet a life on Life, now that’s a gamble. Faith becomes real, doubt increasingly falls to the wayside, for doubt impedes the progress, takes the heart, makes a person retreat, fills with fear. Not by blindly casting it aside, but by learning to put it in its place, learning to understand faith as it has been taught, faith in the one who has acted. Doubt can exist, to be sure, but it’s also an excuse to do that which we are afraid of doing, to leave safety nets, and so we explain the call on us away by using fancy phrases and well tuned considerations.
No, we, in our depths know it’s all true. That’s what I think. Only we don’t know what it all means, how it is working out, because that requires actions on our part to respond to what we know is true.
If we don’t let ourselves respond, and yet still know what is true, this creates a dissonance which we call doubt. The image of leaping off a cliff over a chasm to another cliff comes to mind. Either one commits or one doesn’t. One gambles on making it, or one turns away. Halfhearted leaping is the most disastrous.
So, I’ve leaped out, come what may. The thing is I’m still in midair right now, I haven’t crossed to the other side. And it is a long jump. We’ll see what happens with it all. It’s too late now to turn back. I hear it is quite lovely on the other side, I look forward to exploring the beauty I find.
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