"Summer Time, and the Livin' is Easy"

Yep, I should-a known better...you don't just run out and try to do olympic level hedge trimming on a hot and humid day. Lasted an hour and fell apart. Smartened up, got out of the sun, drank fluids and rested a bit. All better.

This weekend I am going to turn 53. That carries a lot of meaning. My father made it to 53 and then died suddenly. At the time I was a mere puppy at 30. So, a lot of life's wisdom I had to waddle through on my own for better or worse.

Change really can be good for you, but I mostly find it rattling, inconvenient and not a little frightening. Didn't get a cavity until my late 40's, and never had a prescription other than the occasional remedy for this or that. Now, having had two root canals, one tooth implant, a waistline that likes to grow at warp speed and the fact that now I ought to have bought stock in Big Pharma - all these lovely things they forgot to tell me about years earlier. Never mind, I wouldn't have listened anyway.

Career changes, moves and morphs, and how my perspective on this has changed. Climb "the ladder"? Really? What's up there anyways? (I once read Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus -- you should, too.)

In the last resort, I think it's all about good living. About finding out who your friends are and how they are so wonderful at mirroring back to me who I am in their eyes. This past month has been a difficult time of life for me and I have seen how I can be frail about losing my own bearings and sense of direction. I got a booster shot of negatives this month, feeling down on my own self, my need for good people in my life and the loneliness that easily jumps in when I no longer think that they are there, a sense of stupor or lack of direction and the feeling of inadequacy that goes along with it. And the worst is my letting my little "pity party" blind me from a the blessings and life gifts that Someone has always had for me. That hurts really bad because I feel that I ought to know better but my imperfect humanity (or as Soren Kierkegaard would call, 'finitude') has shown itself very clearly to me lately and believe me, it has a certain power that clouds things up really well.

The Hindus worship 330 million gods. They're on to something. Maybe due to my Western way of thinking-mindset (and the pompousness that it all too easily induces) it's absolutely too facile for me to miss their point.

God, who is unfathomable in his total transcendence and "who dwells in light inaccessible" has in his sovereign freedom chosen to show his face to his creatures.  And the sucker punch is that we are consistently surprised at what that face looks like. Two thousand years ago a man was made known as the "visible image of the invisible God". And he did so in ways universal - or, should I say, 330 million ways. I'm gonna be 53...wanna 'grow up' soon to be able to see the many "faces of God" before I give more control to some 'pity party' or whatever.