Up the Sunbeam

My friends, I know I have been quiet a long while. All is well! School is demanding, exciting and rewarding! I miss you all, and thought I would peek back in and share an old post that expressed my heart on this day of remembrance. Now we have the events of Benghazi to add to the sorrows we remember on this date. My prayers are with my beloved country and all the people who sorrow personally for loved ones lost--our hearts are with you always! Some moments from September 11th, 2001 are etched in my memory like names on a tombstone. The first fuzzy awareness in the pre-dawn darkness that something was wrong--what was Hero Husband saying? Airplane? World Trade Center? Coming fully awake to look through my TV-window-on-the-world only to see the crystal clear New York City sky and realizing it could be no accident. Smoke pouring from the gaping hole in one tower . . . and then there were two! Instant knowing--terrorists! It had to be! Firemen, ambulances, police, reporters, terrified peo...

-- Hello, Friends! Anyone here? I've been gone so long I'm not sure I even belong here anymore. The demands of school and team assignments have prevented me from being here like I'd like to be, but my heart is still here even when my words are not. May I tiptoe back in and offer a little something? ~~~~~~~~~~ This is what California's Central Valley looked like in June 2010 when we took a family trip to Disneyland and points south. Green, lush, and every available acre growing crops to provide food for millions, maybe even for you. Tomatoes by the truckload were passing us down the length of I-5. As we ticked off the miles, we passed field after field of blackberries, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, asparagus, grapes, beans, strawberries, melons, lettuce, rice, peppers, spinach, corn, and cotton. Interspersed between the fields we saw orchard upon orchard of almonds, walnuts, pistachios, figs, olives, kiwi, lemons, plums, apples, cherries, peac...

-- It's no secret around here that I love to take pictures, although you might not know it by the infrequency of my photo excursions since I started school. How I miss heading out with my camera to capture whatever my eye is falling in love with wherever I happen to be! The unique beauty in a moment can be what lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner once described as "a fleeting wisp of glory"  (1960)  (C.S. Lewis would have liked that line). It may not even last as long as it takes for the earth to turn one degree of its rotation--the light moves, shadows change, and everything is different in only minutes, even seconds. As amazing a gift as memory is, it walks a delicate dance of deciding what to remember and what to forget . The choices it makes about what it should and shouldn't retain don't always match my wishes . . . and so I take pictures. Without pictures to remember what something really looked like, we lose details, we remember only in pieces.       ...

-- If I write the words, "On a hill far away . . . " what comes to mind? What about, "When peace like a river . . . ?" Try this one, "Mine eyes have seen the glory . . . " Chances are, at least for many of you, these line fragments will start a cascade of words and mental images that follow because the hymns they belong to are engraved deep in your hearts from much repetition. For those of us who grew up in churches where hymns were sung, these phrases are like keys that unlock whole worlds within them; we can scarcely hear the opening phrase without the rest of the hymn springing to life in our memories. Jesus may have been doing the very same thing in this familiar passage: “ From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land.  About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice,  'Eli, Eli,  lema sabachthani?'  (which means  'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' ). ”   Matthew 27:45-46...