Wind S 23 MPH
There's usually beach down there, but with the hurricane surge tide I'm looking straight down into the Bay as I read our apt Collect for this coming Sunday, to pray this morning, as rainwater from Hurricane Sally floods in under our new sliding door and in around our new Bay side windows in the living room:
The Collect.
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A few minutes ago I went outside on 7H porch to snap a pic of the storm rushing Bay water up against us seven levels down, but for some reason it didn't take. Obviously, I was too much minding getting soaking wet in the fourteen seconds I was out there, and not paying enough attention to the camera on my cellphone. Rain is driving hard, really hard against the Bay side windows. Linda is rushing around laying towels down, picking them up, putting replacements down, and rushing the sopping towels to the washer spin cycle and then over into the dryer over and over, in a continuing cycle of being anxious about earthly things.
Me? I'm typing this gardenia blogpost and trying not to be anxious about earthly things, and even now while placed among things that are passing away before my very eyes, such as dissolving new drywall under the new windows, trying to hold fast to those that shall endure, such as our new floors that were installed after Hurricane Michael, all while feeling like Here We Go Again!
Slipping in an idiot's exclamation point here and there to show I'm not angry or upset, indeed, not even anxious! Nomesane?!!
The Collect is a really good example that the efficacy of prayer is not that we cajole God into doing what we anxiously want at the moment, but that, having prayed it, it occurs to us that we must hop to it ourselves or it won't get done. It's called Inspiration, more precisely Enthusiasm, which literally means filled with Theos, God. As well, surely right now God who can't possibly be concerned about my leaking windows and doors is busy with the prayers of folks in the path of the wildfires out west and those looking at the ashes of their charred homes, and people still dealing with the outrages of Hurricane Laura. So, what IS the efficacy of prayer? It's got to be at least in part, that we gain sense enough to see (Mark 9:1 ὁράω again, I see, I perceive, I realize, I understand, I sense in my heart, mind and soul) that God turns our prayers back onto us, to get us, we ourselves, moving on answering them, making them come true if they're really all that important to us. That is to say, if we first offer up our prayer and then go sit and watch the weather channel instead of mopping up the water that's coming in, no wonder we complain that our prayer is not answered. Or, at its most elemental stupidity, no wonder we voice the asinine piety that "sometimes God says No", the rationalization of the obtuse letting God off their hook.
Remembering that for the last how many millennia we have been God's experiment with creating Beings in the image of God. In "The Bible According to Mark Twain", as the heavenly council meets, Satan's is the wise voice, "I'd drown the whole lot of 'em and start over".
When - - hoping you also get to this age (last Monday was my 85th birthday), indeed, wishing you a hundred twenty years - - you get here, you also will have thoughts of eternity from Time to Time. And you, they also may realize (Mark 9:1 again, ἴδωσιν) that those who are asleep in Jesus as Paul has it, are, no matter who we left Aunt Pink's table to in our will, no longer in the least concerned with hurricane winds or leaking windows. We won't even care that they delivered Aunt Pink's lovely table directly to the Goodwill. We'll just be abiding peacefully in things that endure.
T+
Hurricane breakfast: a dozen raw oysters, each in turn dipped in Tabasco and Pepper Vinegar, then salted, draped over a saltine cracker, and popped in the mouth.