Brightest and Best

Noisy. And Bright.

One good thing about me, I don’t mind being wrong. Yesterday I said the surf is not to listen to, that it just is. But a Navy salt knows better, and I thought better as I wrote but wrote anyway. The surf is like a lion. Or a bear, a dog. Well, a cat. Angry, it warns with its growl. Few things are more ominous than a growling cat --don’t pat, don’t touch, don’t reach out, don't say nice kitty -- except the surf. Only a fool doesn’t listen to the surf. A book read years ago, The Great Tide, remembers from the sea the thunderous sound of waves crashing closer and closer to old St. Joseph - - - were they crashing on the barrier peninsula, I don’t recall. No one could imagine what it was until too late. The memory of those who weren't there but heard the story that grew more and more fearsome in the telling is of a mountainous hurricane tide surging in and over and leaving in its withdrawal only rubble and death. Scattered bricks strewn where buildings had stood, where a city was no more, not even in name.

This early morning, 2:14 in truth, I've stood at the window inside what the interior of a tornado might be like as a violent thunderstorm moved ashore, not over me but me high inside it, incredibly continuous lightning and thunder, and wind. And up high, a sense of being The Destroyer itself except that the building was not turning, rotating, twisting. What category hurricane would this building not survive? Would I run from a three or only wish I had? What would a five do, twenty-five or thirty feet of water. Or would it take a meteorite’s hundred foot tsunami -- 

Wonderful storm at sea, when the best vantage point is watching from shore, half a dozen lightning strikes simultaneous within a split second, on the horizon, near, nearer. Close flashes and instant claps of thunder, startling though not frightening because the structure feels so secure. Is it safe to stand this glued to the window inside the lightning itself? Brightest and loudest of the storms of the morning. Reminds me when Jeremy first came to America, summer 1993, observing that our weather is noisier than England's. 

What will come and go and leave nothing where we once were? Weather. Ebola. ISIS. Not from open fountains in the firmament, we've been promised (Genesis 9:11,15). Perhaps from the sea. Or incoming from beyond, deus irae bursting through the blue dome. 

What did Saint Paul expect? Apocalyptic coming of the Son of Man. Me? IDK but not that except perhaps personally. Or will it be simply wafting off into oblivion? Question about the omniscience of God in Sunday School the other day. We're going to Po Folks after church: does your omniscient God know what I’ll order for lunch? Someone said God is too busy to care. So, what does God care about knowing, then? Whether incoming will destroy us like dinosaurs again? Is that more important than my lunch order? Who thinks so hasn’t peered out into the universe and known there is more beyond. What’s insignificant depends on who’s peering, and at what, eh? Who is myopic, me or God?

What do I know? That who mused ‘tis better to have loved and lost ... wasn’t living through daughters growing up and away and wished not to be. My own end of the world for the third time. Fourth, counting when Joe left to go about the rest of his life. Into the army to begin; but there wasn't perpetual war then.

Bible Seminar this morning. We’re doing Mark. 

Transubstantiation: the insanity of aging is accident: head is white, body is lumps, those things are only accidents, what seems, appears, is seen: accident. Substance is twenty. Or seventeen. Who do you love? More, who loves you? Hello? Is anyone there? If there is "reasonable and holy hope in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love," who could possibly want to spend it with some Bubba who won't even get close to the balcony rail. Even if he is seventeen forever. A bubba is still and always a bubba.

Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid ...

TW+


Casualties of the Dawn Boomer: the microwave, the Keurig we brought from home, light and clock in the kitchen range, water pressure (apparently whatever brings water pressure to 15th floor was struck), at least one lamp.