Shades and Colors

This post was started but never published some very long time ago...

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The gate at the front of the road is closed. I'm not surprised by this, I was warned it would be, yet the discovery feels meaningful. I am in Mississippi, standing at the mouth of a winding gravel road. My crunching footsteps bring me down the small hill, past a culvert and small grotto filled with Catholic saints and a small concrete bench. Sun has surrendered to shade. Green smothers brown as fern and moss grow along every imaginable crevice. Ahead is my first memory, at least I believe it to be my first memory.

Imagine a three year old perspective of sunlight growing beyond the canvas of trees, a field of corn to the left and open pasture to the right. These are viewed in the split screen view afforded a small body trying to see over the dash of a large 1970's automobile.

 There is a gentle rise that leads up onto a high point of the surrounding property. In my memory the tree limbs above create a sort of tunnel of shadow exiting onto a sea of bright opened pasture before being swallowed by the cool shade of three 200 year old oak trees that guard a small brick house like sentries.

The purpose of my visit is not to wax nostalgic, I need no trip for that. I am a sentimental fool, I know it, so does everyone else.

My Granny is no longer living in the small brick house, she is living with my Uncle not far from my home in Texas. Her place is a sort of halfway house now. It carries the passing resemblance of the place I knew as a child, yet has the strange feel of a house in a state of metamorphosis from a home-place into something else. This place has always been welcoming, warm, and full of that undefinable quality known as family. You feel like you belong when you're there, but now there is the gate, and an empty feeling.  It's like visiting an alien world where you recognize the shades, but not the colors themselves.

Gone are the mornings where I would wake to the smell of frying eggs, to the gurgle of the percolating coffee pot, and to the sound of a cuckoo clock chiming it's mechanical melody.  Granny is in the kitchen, working around the stove.  Gramps is there drinking coffee, and sipping grapefruit juice.

I'm here to visit my Grandma, not take a trip down that well worn lane called memory.  I'm here because my Grandma Mac has been moved into a nursing home. My parents have been cleaning out her house, getting everything in order.  If my Granny's feels empty, my Grandma's is desolate.  There is sparse furniture, and nothing else.

I'm closing in on 40, and it feels like it must be someone else's age, not my own.  I believe that my childhood is here, in these two places, Granny's and Grandma Macs.  I feel it every time I step onto either place.  Maybe that's the reason this place at 35 feels so wrong.

When you go to places that fill so much emotional real estate it brings so much to mind, and leaves the lingering feeling of loss long after you've left.  The places are the shading to a picture, they give the faintest outlines of what the places are, it's the people who are the color that give a place definition.

Lost Hope

It's nearly midnight. The family are all tucked safely into bed, even my baby girl is asleep. She is tucked into the pure dreams of the newborn, and here I am awake. I'm up thinking, considering, pondering, and perhaps praying. I'm not really all that good at prayer, I've always felt it impersonal, a paper letter waiting response.

 Friday, June 26th, 2015 the Supreme Court made it illegal for states to define marriage as being between only a man and a woman. There was celebration, a joyous chorus, weddings, congratulations. On CNN a reporter mistook a flag that held the image of a dildo and a butt plug for an ISIS flag. Dear Lord I need to learn to pray more fully, more faithfully.  This is what that community fought for?  A flag with those images?  There is no chance this is going to end well.

I'm going to predict something. This secularized culture will implode, I give it thirty years, maybe less.  I'm not a prophet, I can't say for certain times, this is just a prediction, a guess based on past events.

The next generation of kids will grow up in a spiritual vacuum, they will seek something concrete, something with absolutes, and they will turn to... Islam. Islam is the anti-Christianity.  It posits that what matters most are the rules, don't eat this, pray like this, take a pilgrimage, wear this clothing.  Jesus spends a good amount of time preaching against the idea that God can be pleased with the inane following of law, without a heart that desires God above all else.

Islam is poised to take off in the west because it will fill the empty chasm left by several generations of thought that tell everyone that you can make reality in your own image.  When things turn bad, when the next crisis comes, when the celebrations that have started this week end and everyone discovers that nothing has really changed, then what?  The chasm is deep, never ending really.  Nothing can fill it.  Christ is the right answer to that chasm, but I believe the time of our nation turning to the Bible for answers maybe in the past.

The young people of this generation seek a cause, they have sought to pour themselves into something, anything. Nature abhors a vacuum, you can't fill a spiritual void with sex, money, drugs, rock and roll, or social issues. I believe Islam will take off as the anti-secular movement of the next generation. I hope I'm wrong, I hope that Christianity finds its voice once again, that a new Billy Graham will appear and teach us repentance, but I am not optimistic.

If anyone finds this post who is not a family member, and believes I'm some sort of bigot, I can assure you I am not. For the past few days I've seen posts, tweets, memes, and message boards that call me a bigot in an overt sort of way.  By that I mean that I have not posted anything to a message thread and been called a bigot, but I've see messages that call my point of view bigoted.  Not so, you are free to have you're opinion, this is mine.  If you don't agree with what I'm saying it means we have differing opinions, not that I hate you or someone you love. If anything I feel that the hate mostly goes the other way now days. I would not wish to have someone fired for being gay, I would not ask a gay baker to provide a cake for an anti-homosexual group. Somehow it's alright to discriminate if these things are reversed though (and I'm using these examples because these have happened recently). Okay end rant...