Darkness
“We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know who is true.” 1 John 5:19:20
In the book of John, Jesus calls the Devil the original murderer and tells the Pharisees that when Satan lies, he is speaking his native language, as he is the ultimate perpetrator and king of deception.
We started a new five-part series at church this week called “Twisted,” and on Sunday Andy Stanley told us that while it is sometimes hard to fathom, there is an unseen, invisible world that daily impacts the visible world. There are agents at work – whether you want to think of them as emotions or corporeal demons – whose primary goal is to twist the truth. Andy admitted that it’s hard to comprehend sometimes, but that he leans heavy on the Bible, because there is a lot that is hard to comprehend. And where else can you look but to what you know is true?
The Devil wants to destroy everything we hold dear: our relationships, our families, our friendships, even our bodies. His tool is deception and his desired result is destruction.
If you’re resistant to the idea of God, I assume you’re even more resident to the idea of a Devil. But our entire word provides evidence of both. It’s ying and yang. Dark and Light. A world without Evil would be a world where gunmen don’t break into schools with the intent to kill. Where terrorists don’t scheme – sometimes for years – to destroy. A world without Evil would be a world where the Holocaust never happened. How else do you explain systematic, intentional intended eradication of an entire people group? Without Evil, there is no Hotel Rwanda. (Which is also to say, without dark, how would you recognize the Light?)
I have no doubt the Devil lurks. He almost had me – it’s only through Grace that I escaped.
“You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.” 1 John 4:4.
Training
Training for the 2007 Mardi Gras Marathon has officially begun.
Jennifer and I met at the office yesterday at 6:45 a.m. for an easy (and very slow!) jog around Olympic Park and downtown. Right now our plan is to meet twice a week, but I have to figure out how/where/when I am going to do my Saturday long runs.
This is the first time I’m doing this on my own – without the support of a Galloway group – and the prospect of waking up on a Saturday morning and heading out for six, seven, eight plus miles all alone is a little daunting.
The road to February stretches out before me and it may be only 13.1 miles, but it looks a lot longer when you’re still at the starting line.
I miss him. I miss him. I miss him.
Around the World in 365 Days
Yesterday I told my mom that I would not travel as much in 2007 as I have in 2006 because I was just exhausted from all of it. “Except for Savannah in January and Florida in June, because those are for work. Oh, and when we go to Florida in the spring.” And then I remembered: New Orleans in February for the Mardi Gras Half; the Missions team is planning a return trip to Romania in June. And I’m hoping there will be at least one wedding – if not two – in Ohio and I can’t go an entire year without seeing Michael and I’m sure my dad would like it if I came to Houston at least once. So there I am again with a full year of traveling in front of me and it’s still only October.
I love traveling, but it’s hard to do when you have a pet. You either have to burden your friends or come up with a few hundred bucks for boarding (that I can now increase by 33% with the addition of a second dog – thankfully they don’t double the price), not to mention the tickets and parking/cab fare/MARTA money to get to the airport in the first place. And I’m a homebody by nature – I like being in my house. When the dogs and I went back to our house yesterday after their eight nights at the Coole’s (and my four), I was never so glad to be home, ever.
Sometimes I’m amazed when I look at my Flickr sets and see all the places I’ve been over the past year. How did I manage it all? How is my house still standing, unrobbed? Why is Montego even still speaking to me?
But I’m so grateful that I got to travel to all those places and see all the things that I saw. I got to hang out with my dad in Houston; see one of my best friends get married on a beach in Jamaica; spend a long weekend with my favorite female family members in Florida; gamble in Vegas; see the sun set in Hilton Head Island; stand among Roman ruins in Transylvania; hold my brand new nephew in Ohio; worship with 800 of my closest friends on the sands of Destin; and see hundreds of hot air balloons ascend into the sky in Albuquerque.
In two weeks I’ll be in the waters off the Yucatan Peninsula and two weeks after that I’ll be back at my dad and Ginger’s house in Texas – one of my favorite places on the planet – to eat turkey and watch lots of DVDs and take long walks with their dog.
I am lucky; I’m not complaining. But sometimes I wonder what I am missing here when I’m gallivanting off over there. Maybe in 2007 I’ll find out.
Tie that Binds
My cousin Anne said that our grandmother is shedding her skin. She’s lost 11 pounds since June, which is a lot considering she was almost all bone to begin with.
“We talk a lot about Daddy,” my mom told me. “She wants to talk about Jo and Billy and Dick.”
Last week she sent me a card, dictated to my mother, and as I read my grandmother’s words via mother’s flowing script, I realized that I don’t own anything with my MeMe’s handwriting on it. I don’t know why that would matter, but it does.
The card was just an I’m-thinking-of-you card and inside she’d stuck two $5 bills. She’d heard that Starbucks raised their prices (a whole nickel) and she wanted to pick up my coffee for the week.
“She wants to do little things like that a lot more now,” my mom said.
They bought her “going away clothes” as she is calling them – a pink nightgown and a pink housecoat to wear over it. She finally decided who she wants to give her little diamond studs to – the earrings her daughters presented her with on the auspicious occasion of her 90th birthday, almost nine years ago. “I want Sophia to have them,” she said. So my mother took out the notebook that lists furniture and books and china – a handwritten record of who gets what the day my last living grandparent dies – and wrote down, “diamond earrings, Sophia.”
The big pieces – like my grandfather’s roll top desk – will be sold at auction for the sake of “fairness.” The remaining kids agreed that whoever wanted whatever it was badly enough could pay the estate for it. That seems weird to me… that children would fight over or have to buy back something that belonged to their parents. It seems weird, but not unlikely. I should know, as I almost had a meltdown at the thought of a wash stand being sold at auction when I desired it so much. The wash stand isn’t much of anything. It’s old and it’s wood and it’s no big deal, but for some reason, it represents my grandmother. It belonged to her eldest sister, Lois, who was born in 1899 and who died a childless widow. She left almost everything to her little sister Jo – who else was there? – and my grandmother cared for Lois’s things with reverence and respect. My mom told MeMe that I wanted the wash stand and she said, of course. So there is my name, in this amended, wouldn’t-stand-up-in-court spiral bound record of all my grandmother’s worldly possessions.
I asked my mom why she was telling me all this. Certainly she didn’t think my grandmother was going to die tomorrow. “No, I think she could go any day,” my mom answered. “Then again, she can afford to live to 105, so who knows?”
Our lives are short, whether we live to be 98 or not. But I know, and I know my grandmother knows, that eternity is what we are waiting on. That gives me comfort. That no matter what and no matter when, I will never lose her.
-
Compassion
