Writing is so cathartic. I see why Moses, David and Solomon did so much of it. I see why blogging exploded years ago. I see why over time people from every walk of life have turned to their diaries or journals. I’ve been journaling since the middle nineties, and I bet if I collected all the handwritten journals in this house there’d be at least ten. That doesn’t even include all the words I’ve written online. Books upon books of essays have been written. I remember when dad was pastoring a church in Kansas I was in the third grade. I wrote a short story about a football game for Miss. Riley. My parents raised us to read and write from day one. I remember learning to read in Hollywood, Florida. I started Kindergarten in Guam, and I continued in Nashville, but the indelible memory that is lodged in my mind came in Hollywood. Mom has been published in a magazine called Christian Woman, and dad has written for Power For Today, and my brother Jason has several published books. The link to his blog is right here. You can purchase his books there too.

Writing is important even if not one other person reads it. You’ll go back at some point and read it yourself. And after you die someone will uncover what you’ve written.

Obviously I’m a Judeo-Christian, and I take a high view of the Bible. I long for the love of Jesus to direct my thinking and actions, so when I write a post like this I’m more in tune to the legacy left behind than I am in the privacy of my own angst. Here lately I’ve discovered my roots in the Church of Christ. You see, about a year-and-a-half ago we left the Church of Christ for a non-denominational church called Cross Point. It’s been an adjustment, but I think we made the right decision. The Church of Christ as a rule is much more male dominated, but Cross Point actually has a female teaching pastor, and her work is speaking the love of the Father in highly effective ways. We wanted our daughter to be around that kind of influence. Cross Point has several campuses in middle Tennessee, and the campus (Nashville) we attend just hired a new youth pastor at the beginning of 2020. When we first met him in the foyer of the Nashville campus one the first things he said to our daughter Chloe was something about becoming a pastor. I’ve been thinking along those lines for years because my mom continues to pastor me, and I’m almost 50. Women have been silenced far too long when it comes to spiritual discussion, but some of Jesus’ closest confidants were women, and women were preaching among the men on the day of Pentecost. Tradition is inevitable, but sometimes traditions need to change. Thank God Annie F. Downs accepted the call to the pastorate because her work is inspiring many women in Nashville and beyond to be confident in who God made them to be.

When Covid ends I’m looking forward to getting back into the routine of worshipping with my brothers and sisters. This season has been a horrendous dose of medicine I’d have rather not consumed, but alas we have more pills to swallow, and I refuse to pretend like everything is okay when it isn’t. It’s been hard, it’s still hard, and it looks like it’s going to continue to be hard. How long it’s going to be hard I don’t know. There are so many things we don’t know, but we can know that God is our friend, He’s near, He’s right next to us, but He is transcendent over galaxies NASA hasn’t even seen. We could not have known even a year ago that we would go through what we are going through. Talk about an understatement. What does deserve full acceptance is the fact that God is still on His throne, Jesus is at His right hand, and the Holy Spirit is just as influential as She was in the first century. When we try to pigeonhole the Father into the nice little traditions we’re used to we miss the grandeur of God that He longs for us to know. Is He our friend? He is absolutely our friend. He is also the Creator of the universe and earth we live on.

Nothing is too small He does not notice, and nothing is too big that He can’t manage, including a global pandemic. I don’t know why He allowed this pandemic to arrive. I’m sure the same question was asked in diaries back in 1920. There’s nothing new under our sun as Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, so I’m following Emily Lemley’s advice by trusting in God. Here’s been here before, and He will lead us to where we need to be.