Bellewood

Part 1

            Earl lived in the nursing home for more than 18 months, though home is wrong.  Bellewood is not a home.  When he arrived, Earl understood it was a temporarily rented room, a dorm.  The first day, going down the long hall in a wheelchair he glanced back at Ruby, his wife, and told her, “I guess I’ll die here.”  She looked aside, towards the wall and told him to, “…not say such things.”  He guessed to me privately that he should be thankful such places existed.    

            In the following months this idea turned into an ebbing mantra and thinned to a frail line like his own silver spit that would leak down his chin, spoken finally without conviction and trailing off beyond purpose.  Many here don’t even know the particular name of the place they live. 

            Of course, the residents see things from the inside out.  That’s obvious but I don’t think outsiders appreciate that.  What it’s like full time, a visitor can only guess.  Residents smell the halls all day and all night, like working in a bakery only without the sweet; colostomy and urine, liquefied foods and sterile lemon bleach cleansers mix oddly. 

             Some are in their second or third home.  Families, forces beyond their control, gauged care, shuffle the remaining parent to the place they think best.  Betrayed by health and suspicious progeny their powers of attorney get talked out of them or surreptitious court orders are obtained or living wills presented.  Somehow or another they end here.  Those yet in their right minds understand too well what is going on.

            The grandchildren with their often illegitimate offspring were more frequent before this.  They used to visit “ma and pa”.  They were there for meals and a place to stay and money.  That was before all this, when everyone was relatively well and when they needed help.  But now, extended family rarely visits and when they do they don’t stay long.  These are the same children who can’t stand to be alone on a Friday night.  They desperately try for mom or grandma to watch their children for the evening so they can go out and try to make another one.  They are too young to understand how history repeats.  There’s a whole level of abandon they have yet to consider.

            And when they visit there isn’t much to say.  There isn’t much to note or discuss.  Somehow, “What did you do today?” is ridiculous to someone bound to a wheelchair, stalled in a room, and checked every two hours by a CNA.  Current events don’t fit in a place where televisions and most other forms of private property aren’t allowed, but for the common rooms.  Even the weather loses relevance to those who never get outside.  Simply because there is a construction paper cutout of a Christmas tree or a rainbow or an Easter egg with a man’s name on it doesn’t make it a pleasant place.  The mumbling of the bedfast roommate doesn’t help either.

            These homes are without personal phone calls.  They are out of the question because the logistics and costs of having a separate phone in each room, to be shared between two roommates, are confusing and potentially litigious.  The cords would be a treachery and the receivers would offer bludgeoning opportunities for the unruly.  There would also be bickering between families about who used whose phone.  Besides all that, in late-stage dementia, when the hand cannot be trusted with a cup of coffee, the voice on the other end would just be meaningless.

            In these homes things also tend to disappear: spare pajama tops, toothpaste, perfume, slippers, gold framed wind up alarm clocks, even walkers and wheelchairs sometimes get away.  And not to be sinister, but in a place where the residents can’t walk and have nowhere to walk to and where the rooms are barren and where nothing is stored even under the beds, one has to consider the alternatives.  These homes have caretakers, attendants, wing nurses and orderlies.  Lots of things sometimes get lost.

            So that’s where Earl lived for over eighteen months and some days it didn’t even register with him as to where he was.  He had late stage Parkinson’s, marginalized in his thinking in all but the most jagged realizations.  He was left alone with his thoughts and yet somehow unable to consider them.  I don’t believe in purgatory, but understand where the idea comes from.

Part 2

            Brother Earl;

            I am writing you this letter because I want to know why it takes so long for some men to die.  I don’t think you have the answer and I doubt you will ever read this.  Your Parkinson’s will not allow you to be clear long enough for you to understand.  In this sense I suppose it isn’t really to you, as much as it is about you.  I hope you would understand.

            In World War II you were a heavy machine gunner assigned to a tank unit.  German and Italian shells crashed around you at places like Agheila and Anzio.  My apologies, but I can’t picture you then, buttoned up in your green suit, pulling levers and squinting through slots to find your bearings in some hellishly hot metal box, pointing the end of your fifty-caliber towards the twinkles of enemy fire.  It’s not that I don’t believe you.  It’s just such a remove from where you are today.

            You told me once you got to see Patton, the man, not the movie.  Another time you said you were strafed and snuggled under a supply truck with an anonymous Italian woman you pulled out of harm’s way. You whispered this story to me while Ruby was downstairs.  There were late night supply runs and roads you had to back down because of German choke points.  So you’re not new to this; men dying quickly around you and I do have the sense that your youth was fast forwarded by the war and those late teen years must have prepared you for this. 

            I’m trying not to be morbid.  I don’t want you to die.  But seeing you like this, it’s not good.  You barely respond.  You don’t look out the window so much as you are pointed towards the glass.  The open shades don’t draw a focus.  You blink hard in the sharp light.  What do you see out there, staring at things I can’t?  Your hand doesn’t squeeze mine back when I ask.

            Others come here and die within weeks or months.  What is this, your fifth or sixth roommate?  You remind me of Jonah, 18 months in the fish’s belly, no dry land in sight.  I want to know why it’s taking so long.  I want to know so I can have something to tell you and your wife and the people who ask.  For my own walking to and fro through the earth, I want to know for myself.  Maybe I shouldn’t be asking you.

Part 3

            On good days we visit.  We talk.  We pray and hold hands.  I go early in the morning because that’s when he’s most likely to be awake.  I have my best chance of catching him aware in the mornings.  By the time I arrive he’s been fed, though not yet cleaned.  Trickles of a yellow orange drink called Nectar are almost always coagulated on his chin and shirt.  I know the name of the stuff because the wax and cardboard box it comes in is usually still on the table.  It doesn’t matter.  In the morning we can still enjoy one another’s company.  One time I mentioned to him that we don’t have much to talk about.  He agreed and it was quiet again.  He knew I was there, and I wanted to stay longer than I did but he tends to drift off.

            The hard thing to say, that both Earl and his wife said to me, was that he was ready to go.  The difficult admission for many nursing home residents is that they are dying.  Earl got past that early on.  He knew it was coming and he grew impatient for it.  Barring a quick accident, it’s something we’ll all face – not the dying, but the admission that death is on the way, personally, for us.  But knowing death is coming and being impatient for it to arrive, outside some imbalance or anguish found in a young life, are two separate things.  It’s like the sour old smell that lingers, just an hour or so beyond any bath or shower.  Once it’s there you can’t shake it.  While it may be easier for a young man to say that he will not go gently into that good night, it’s more courageous for an old man to become impatient and wish it to hurry.

            Not to be heavy handed, but you should know that before I was born Earl accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.  I cannot imagine the hopeless doom offered by the alternative.   The other side will be peaceful and rewarding for him.  It’s just that getting there seems to be taking such a long time.  It’s like being in the house waiting for an overdue guest to arrive; only the guest never said when they would arrive, only that they would be coming sometimes, perhaps in a day or so.  Waiting by the window a long time even small things can become advanced announcements; rain, first frosts, and reemerged memories of Tennessee rivers are mentioned like prophecy.

            On the drive home I have to decide how to deal with it and what to pray for.  I struggle to remember it’s not really about me.  The Habakkuk in me comes out swinging.  He was the one demanding immediate answers.  His situation was grim, more so than mine and Earl’s put together.  His cries required exclamation points from the translators.  The Jamesians even gave him a few.  Habakkuk’s complaints weren’t questions.  He saw violence against God’s people on a daily basis and he wanted to know why he had to see it.  The land promised to Israel was overrun by an unjust and ungodly group.  The golden accumulation of Solomon’s better days was trotted away, packed into the trunks of unbelieving men, the conquerors of his progeny.

            The lives of peace promised in the 29^th Psalm don’t seem to be happening either.  Is this causing the ringing in my ears or is it just the whine of tires on the interstate?  It’s the same stitching I see after every visit, the highway yellow rectangles dividing the coming from the going.

            I want to challenge the suffering on behalf of a man who has life and Christian experience I cannot, and may never fully appreciate.  I squint through the late morning sun and it doesn’t seem right.  I demand that a man of God I have known for ten years deserves better.  He’s been a faithful member of one church for about as long as I have been alive.  He’s served his country, raised his family, and loved his wife.  The unfairness is orange hot.  The tide of thoughts turns my questions into demands.  Like Habakkuk, I start to accuse.  I’m wondering why I get to see this.  Something warns me to back off.

            A curve in the road reminds me to back off.  When I cross the Illinois River I am reminded also of Zechariah.  He lived with much of what Habakkuk lived with.  He saw the same unjust things.  His first vision was of a man on a horse at night, among Myrtle trees; evergreens with white flowers and dark berries, followed by speckled horses.  When I exit the highway I roll down the windows and can almost smell the damp loam of the river bottom.  It must have been an incredibly peaceful place to visit, in his dream.  Zechariah waits, watches, and then lets the Spirit ask, “How long will you not have mercy…?”  It’s a good point to make at the end of captivity.

            There is patience, and then there is patience; there are ways to approach the Lord, and then there are ways to approach the Lord.  My anger management issues threaten this message.  But the patient dreamer is soothed by night visions.  Earl and I and the family that still cares have all run up to God demanding to be saved, when we have already been saved.  It’s just a matter of time.  Why is that so easy to forget?

Some Things Personal

Ok, I was feeling pretty good about this whole blog thing.  Look at all the posts.  I am like totally destroying last year’s number of posts.  Granted, two is not difficult to totally destroy, but still.  Blogging, enjoyable, driving production of written words, keeping goals and having fun at the same time, what could be better, aside from a run-on sentence I didn’t take time to tame but somehow managed to make sense?  Then someone griped.  They said I should put something personal on here to let people know about me, like that would be interesting.  So, I abdicate once again to the gripers.  Here are some personal things.

Personal thing #1:

I am a pastor.  I have been a pastor for sixteen years and some change.  Very early a wise old man who was also a pastor told me if I could find anything else to do that would satisfy the call, to do it instead.  I never found that other thing and he was right.

Personal thing #2:

I hate prefixed-literature.   Any kind of writing with a word in front of it, I hate.  This includes Christian, feminist, gay, and whatever else you can think of.  I understand genre.  That’s fine.  I get it.  But please, can we judge a work on the merits of the work and not on the current geo-political-gender-race-sexual orientation-red state – blue-state prism?  Nice writing is nice writing and if I’m really grooving on a writer I’ll take the time to see what’s behind the story.  Otherwise, I don’t need to have it sliced and diced and pre-prepared for my consumption based on a marketing cluster. 

Personal thing #3:

I have a thing about how we no longer have privacy.  I’m not sure we appreciate that fact, as a culture or as individuals.  If I worked for the FBI and wanted to create a national database that kept track of people, where they live, what they do, what they think, and who their friends and enemies are, while keeping data-entry costs non-existent, the perfect system would be facebook.  I know how that sounds and I’m really not a tin-foil hat kinda guy, but then again…  Like I said, I have a thing.  I’m reticent about being too personal on the internet.  I’m cautious about it. 

Personal thing #4:

I like to write.  In my brain this blog is mostly an outlet for creative writing and an initial foray into creating a home-base for some planned ebooks (stay tuned).  Think about what it means to be a pastor who likes to write creatively.  The preconceived notions of what pastors are supposed to be swarm like angry hornets.  For example, everything I write is supposed to be pure and inspiring and about the Bible.  I should never ever cast a cold unflattering light on people of faith, and should maintain a caricature-ish and awkwardly simple level of fiction, a la Ned Flanders.   Right?  No cussin’, no sex, no blood, no nothing like that and the good guys always, and I mean always, win.  Deus ex machina was a plot device before it was a cool video game.  Look it up.

Personal thing #5:

I'm a smelly human.  I was a smelly human way before I answered the call to be a pastor.  I have smelly human thoughts, I've experienced smelly human experiences, and sometimes my writing reflects these experiences.  I mean, have you seen the world?  That's the life I've known and what's so graceful about the Grace of God is that it shines through anyway.  Despite our best efforts there are still blessings and wonderful things.

Do the Math

Let’s say a guy makes a big pot of spaghetti on an average of once a day, every ten days, for sixteen years.  That’s 584 pots of spaghetti.  That’s 876 pounds of pasta and 1,168 pounds of ground beef and pork.  That’s 1,479 gallons of water.  That’s 584 loaves of bread because he always makes garlic bread.  I’m not including the garlic bread numbers.  That’s 876 tablespoons of olive oil.  That’s 584 onions.  That’s 876 cloves of garlic.  That’s at least 1,752 tablespoons of various Italian herbs and spices, fresh in the summer, store bought in winter.  I say at least because he never measures.  That’s at least 1,752 ounces of catsup.  That’s also 584 twelve-ounce cans of unsalted tomato sauce and at least that many fresh tomatoes.  Don’t forget salt and pepper, also unmeasured – probably an ounce each batch.  That’s 876 hours of effort in the kitchen.  Never mind the shopping and never mind the dirty dishes. Whoever cooks doesn’t have to do dishes – house rule.

These numbers are translatable to something more meaningful and relevant.   But I’m lazy and don’t do that.

Point is, it's epic.  I do epic things.  So do you.  But the forest for the trees and all that…  Stay inspired and heroic.  Do things for others.  It adds up.

At Tuesday Practice

          At Tuesday practice, a girl named Brianna, with a baby fat face and braided pigtails hanging down to just below her ears, picked up a smaller girl named Alexis.  Brianna weaved her hands under Alexis’ armpits and then locked her fingers at the chest.  She heaved and spun around twice before setting Alexis down hard in the matted grass in front of the goal.  “Shut up,” she yelled down.  “You shut up.  I’m the goalie!”

            Coach saw this out of the corner of his eye just as earlier he had heard Brianna’s sister Brea tell another girl, “You be quiet or I’m going to tell you to shut up.”  He was busy setting offence and had kept walking downfield towards the goal.

            Alexis got up, brushed the grass from her backside and asked him, “Coach, where am I?”

            “I want you as goalie,” he told her and then motioned with his hand and head for Brianna to step out on defense.

            Kaitlin’s mom, whose daughter was the one Brea almost told to shut up, had enough. She saw the whole thing.  She pivoted out of her lawn chair on the sidelines and walked to the coach.  Uncrossing and re-crossing her arms, she told him what happened and about what her daughter told her at drink break.

            He nodded several times and promised, “Ok, I’ll talk to her mom after practice.”

            Brianna heard everything that was said about her sister.  Brea was ten months older.  All the girls were in second grade at the same school.  Some of them had different teachers.  Of course they were on the same soccer team.

            After practice Brianna was first to her mom.  She ran across the field towards the parking lot, yelling, “Mom, mom, Brea got in trouble.  Mom, Brea got in trouble by Kaitlin’s mom.  Mom, she went out on the field and talked to coach.”

            Brianna’s mom, surrounded by other moms and talking because it was also the night of the book fair and they only had twenty minutes to wait, watched her daughter run closer and then asked, “Uh-oh, what did she do?”  She smiled and swiveled her head around to the other moms. They smiled back.  Some of them started different conversations, just beyond Brianna’s account.

            “She told Kaitlin to shut up and Kaitlin’s mom heard it.”  Brianna reached for her hug, pressing her face against her mom’s bulky sweatshirt.  By the time Brea kicked the ball from the field to her mom and the cluster of other women and children, coach was just a few yards back. Brea’s mom reached down to her older daughter and put her hands on either side of her head.

            “What did you tell Kaitlin?”

            “What?” was all Brea asked.

            Brianna still clutched the side of her mom’s thigh when Brea was pulled in for her own big hug.

            Coach told his own daughter, who was also on the team, to take the water bottles and help pick up the orange cones and to then wait in the truck.  He spoke pleasantly to the women assembled on the blacktop, telling them about one more game this coming Saturday and yes he would be glad the season was done and that the team had done well even though they lost most of their games and that the real thing was to learn and to have fun.

            Kaitlin’s mom and Kaitlin walked along the edge of the parking lot and about midway between their car and Brea’s mom she told her daughter that, “The next time she says that to you you just tell her to deal with it.  We aren’t going to put up with that anymore.  It’s been all season.”

            Kaitlin’s mom used her loud voice.  She said this at the same time coach was talking about how if it rained a little they would still have the last game but if there was a lot of mud or any thunder at all then the game would be cancelled and how they would just play it by ear and he would be sure to call if the game was postponed in any way.

            He continued chatting until sensors on the lights in the parking lot detected the sunset.  The lights buzzed and flickered and clacked on.  At first they hummed like giant cicadas.  Eventually they stopped humming.  His daughter rolled down the truck window and yelled across the parking lot, “Dad, can we go?”

            Kaitlin and her mom were gone.

            Coach left Brea, Brianna, their mom, and all the other moms and all the other children because he wasn’t going to the book fair.  When he was gone they agreed, coach was a very nice man.

Those Doggone Kids

For fourteen years I worked in the IT industry.  I started as a technical writer, went on to software testing and then as a manager of a help-desk.  Later, as a consultant I worked with Fortune 500 companies, mostly in the Midwest, though I managed to get to the west coast a time or two.  When the office downsized I was a practice manager with a dozen direct reports.  After that, I did some independent work in the field but the bubble had popped and soon after I found a teaching position at a community college here in Central Illinois.  I’ve been there nearly six years.

I say from experience there is something wrong with our public schools.  For example (and there are many examples), a little child, say six or seven years old, wants to know everything.  ‘Why’ is always on their lips.  Their desire to know and to see how things work, to determine why things are the way they are becomes incessant a times.  Then, twelve years of public schooling later, that same child has been drained of innate curiosity.  The ones who arrive in my classes don’t want to know anything.  That’s a broad brush stroke but almost without exception it is true.  The next time you talk with a nineteen or a twenty year old ask them what they are curious about, what they want to discover, or what’s going on in the intellectual parts of their brains.  If you are an employer think about why the new hire demonstrates so little initiative.

We say we live in the information age.  The internet allows us to teach ourselves ancient Greek or how to change brake pads.  We can learn basic wiring or how network routers work.  This costs as much as an internet hookup.  Most of the accumulated knowledge of mankind resides at the tips or our fingers.  But when I ask the recent high school graduates, “What do you want to write about?” there’s only a blank stare.  Early in the semester we spend two full class sessions to create a list of five topics they want to investigate.  Some students can’t come up with three.  What happens to curiosity? 

I am not saying there are classes on how to not want to learn, but there is something endemic about public education that teaches this lesson and it teaches it well.  This is one symptom of many.

It is equally fascinating how few basic writing skills the students possess.  The community college offers an array of developmental reading and writing and science and math courses for those lacking the necessary skills to succeed at the college level.  And of the students who test into English Composition, not developmental, a full one third have difficultly writing a complete, coherent paragraph free of basic usage errors.

These students have been through twelve years of schooling.  That’s over a decade of their lives.  They study and practice writing in one form or another each of those years.  They graduate high school, are awarded diplomas representing academic accomplishment; they meet the minimum educational standards set by the state of Illinois and some of them cannot write a complete sentence.  Some cannot recognize a variable in basic algebraic terms.  Illinois is not unique.  This is another symptom.

At this point we will, I suppose, mobilize the usual way.  When someone has the audacity to mention things like these, people run for their preferred trench.  Teachers jump into the educator trenches, administrators to theirs.  Parents go to the defensive heights of their encampment and the students who bother to be concerned to theirs.  And from these positions we fight it out and talk of school reform and who does what and where is the money and so on and so forth.  The groups are suspicious of one another, have been for some time.  This seems how we approach problems these days.  When there is something wrong we run to the friendly group and attack the others.  The tribal meme works well for warfare but does little for progress and solving shared problems, but at least it occupies our time.

As I understand it, forced (or mandatory if the word forced makes you wince) public schooling as we think of it has been around since shortly after the Civil War.  I’m not certain of the specific dates but dropping literacy rates shows when it really began.  We are dealing with mature, well protected systems.  There’s a lot at stake and here I am not talking about the students.  There are vested interests all around, jobs and titles and positions and, dare I say, entitlements.  That’s why people get protective and suspicious.  We can talk all day about doing things for the children, but be honest enough to admit there are other influences involved and some of these influences take precedence.  Systems like to preserve themselves.

Here is a question:  how can significant percentages of students attend school for twelve years, be granted a diploma representing academic accomplishment, and yet remain mostly innumerate, very close to illiterate, and in possession of few skills with which to feed themselves, while at the same time possessing no interests other than a vague notion that they have to go to college to obtain the fabled, ‘good job’?

Now please, in answering this question, don’t start shooting in the direction of the other trenches.  Don’t devolve into merit pay or teachers’ unions or funding or parental involvement or how kids are these days or use any of the other rhetorical ammunition we typically fire.  The answer is more than these things.  All that is really about protecting what is already in place.

What’s happening has been happening so long we don’t dare mention it and the answers are uncomfortably close.  We have these unique markers called fingerprints.  We are individuals.  We come from unique families and from unique hometowns, different communities and different influences.  Yet how do we ‘do’ school?  It comes from on high, does it not?  The individual student is to fit into a pre-cut slot of the educational system.  He or she is a little piece and is placed at a young age into a great old machine; placed via testing and class rankings and competency scores and hundreds of other subtle positioning mechanisms.  Twelve years later the student is spit out the other side.

Students learn to obey buzzers and bells.  The seven rules for walking down the hall are enshrined on the walls and random bits of information are presented to them in increments of forty minutes if everyone behaves.  If it is a favorite class about something a student really starts to enjoy it’s too bad because time is up and they have to change the channel and go to the next thing.  When a student reads too fast they are warned not to read ahead.  If a student reads too slowly they receive a nice life-long label.  They march through the system, highly regulated for years and are then told go to college and continue to figure out what they want to do with their lives.  When, truthfully, interest in anything relevant was drummed from them a long time ago.

Schooling is not tailored for the individual.  It is tailored for the school.  Schooling is not fit for the neighborhood, the larger community, or even the hometown. Instead, it comes from above.  It is the state mandate which, in turn, receives pedagogy from an even higher authority – the Federal Government.  But what would someone in Springfield or in Washington DC know about what students need in a place like this?  Ask that question too loudly and you will never become a superintendent.

Imagine if this particular apple cart were purposely tipped.  Think of the layers upon layers of regulators who make decisions for children living hundreds or perhaps a thousand miles away.  Whatever else would they do to otherwise feed themselves if they could not mandate and regulate and measure results they, themselves, handed down as important enough to mandate and regulate and measure?  Do we appreciate the billions of dollars made by the text book industry each year and how that industry might have a vested interest in keeping the current system in place?  There is, I am told, a similar industry devoted to standardized testing.  That word should draw our concern.  Whose standards are being tested?  And why?  The point is that there are hundreds of suppliers dependent on keeping things the same and they employ lobbyists and influencers who work from the halls of Congress all the way to the local school board.   Look and you will see them.  They system runs the students through the system that is fueled by the costs incurred to run the system.

With a broader perspective we need to ask:  are things done that are beneficial for the students or for the powers running the schooling?  It is one thing to be educated.  It is another to be schooled.

There is a different way to do it.  It’s out there, somewhere.  Maybe we can’t imagine it fully because we’re products of that system. Maybe too much energy is used sniping at one another.  Maybe we’re bailing water on a sinking ship and don’t have the time.  But what we have isn’t working.  The system is preserving itself and is as healthy as ever.  The end results, however, look to be more by-product than product.

Teen Estrogen Claymores

This minefield can't last much longer.
I feel the gray hairs grow on my head
when I don't understand what I said
that made one of my daughter's cry.
And when I do understand what I said
I don't understand why she would cry
but then I begin to wonder why
I even said what I said.
Then there's the times I don't say what I say
and they wonder why so quiet, dad?
Well, dear, give me a minute.
Right now I'm on my knees with a tiny brush
measuring the fractious steps necessary,
avoiding a buried peril.
I think I've spotted it and might could be able
to disarm the spring releases, unscrew the caps, remove the fuses
and in careful stages of navigation
hope not to join the silent generation of men.

Sun's So Bright I Froze To Death

The sun’s so bright I froze to death.  That one goes way back.  It is one of my earliest memories of music.  I ascribe to this line no great meanings, but I think I might finally get it, or at least I've found an application for the idea.

There are believers who know the exact month when the world is going to end.  Just ask them.  They pick days on the calendar.  Others give themselves a month or two on either side of their equations.  That’s probably best because calculations like these are more plausible when there is wiggle room.  Here I am talking about a biblical cataclysmic event involving the book of Daniel, the rise of the Anti-Christ, and the set-up for the seven years of tribulations and the United States is the Great Whore of Babylon and that means the USA is going to be taken out of the photo-finish at the end.  They have done the math.  They know.  That kind of thing.

This seems to fit a general mood.  Lots of people think something bad is about to happen.  And it’s true; things could get really crappy really fast, like overnight.  It sure does feel like something big is going to happen.  It’s in the air.  And just where is the United States in scripture?  We do seem very busy buying and selling.

But these guys, they know when.  Or, actually, they knew.  Their first date has come and gone.  So maybe they revise their calculations or maybe someone else comes along with a new calculation.  That’s the bright sun.  Sometimes it is so bright that a man can’t see much else and in that sun-induced blindness, other things are overlooked.

When that happens, the fun tends to evaporate from the fundamentalism.  Taking liberties with the admonition to live in the truth, in word and deed; this is the freezing to death part.  There is liberty to be rude and ugly and gossipy and bitter and that’s just the way it is.  There isn’t much left over for things like kindness and forbearance and gentleness and how we shouldn’t give none occasion and how if the weak brother has a problem eating a ham sandwich then don’t eat ham around that brother.  With sun-bright freezing the good things go out the window.  Peace and joy and love, the best of gifts, are blanketed under burdens of anger and being ticked off at everything.  And, by the way, don’t disagree and don’t challenge because the White Horseman has already ridden.  Don’t dare caution and don’t mess with the dates of arrival.  Because if you do, then the pillory for you, my brother!  Again, freezing to death.

Maybe that’s the problem when people get the Revelation fever.  We are moving from point A to point B in time and there is nothing we can do about it.  It’s in the book.  It’s going to happen and it is overwhelming to consider.  But in the meantime, the rest of the New Testament also applies.