Drifting Through Life On A Memory
Writer Author Jerry Lee Kay Sr.
Christian Article
:
Christian Living
- Fiction No
My son is a chip off the old block as they say, he just refuses to live anywhere without a porch, a big porch. He not long ago was sitting on his back porch drinking his morning coffee when he spotted a baby owl sitting on the ground. He said he didn't know what to do so he called my son in-law, who is a wildlife biologist for the state of Texas. He said, "Don't do anything to that baby owl. If you look up, somewhere in a tall tree you will see he is not alone. His mother has told him to sit very still in order that he might not be seen by a cat or anything else. It takes about two dark nights for a baby owl to spread his wings and fly. In the meantime, if you will look up, you'll see his mother."
Bubba said, (that would be my son, everybody that's anybody got a son named Bubba in Texas..Amen?) he and his wife went out into the yard and looked up into the top of an oak tree and there they saw the mother owl with dark, unblinking eyes fastened on the baby owl and everything and anything that came near him. My son in-law also told him, owls will be very aggressive when it comes to protecting their young, and most people don't know it but can be awesome in battle.... My! My! Lord Jesus help me to be still so I can write this word of encouragement to your children....Amen!
I once had a beach house on the Gulf of Mexico and lived there alone for a while, needless to say I spent untold hours, days,
and months sitting on my deck looking out over the ocean and sometimes riding or walking up and down the beach. To some I had become a hermit. To me it was a time of therapy. A time of reflection, a time of finding my way. And re-discovering my God. And dear friend how my soul did cry out for my God, but try as I may, I couldn't feel Him. I couldn't find Him, and I needed so very much to have Him draw me close and let me just lay my weary head upon His bosom. And I cried out day and night for relief from a heavy load that was suddenly thrust upon me in my mind. But It seemed my cry could get no higher than the dark clouded sky.
I was suffering burnout after more than forty years of ministry and work and never a vacation. Constantly, day in and day out dealing with weak Christians, and whiny baby adults crying over a stubbed toe or ingrown toe nails, or sniveling over something that happened to them 30 years ago, I just wanted many a time to slap them and say; 'Just get over it' time to move on!..and the worst of those were the ones that thought of themselves as 'Super Saints'....Council to drug addicts and Alcoholics. In and out of the jails and prisons dealing with thieves and child molesters and murderers. Sick to death of wannabe preachers and so-called prophets that never once in their miserable lives have ever seen the stuff I've seen. I've been shot twice, stabbed multiple times and beaten within an inch of my life, all while in the service of ministry. While religious pious yo-yo's want to split hairs over what somebody said thousands of years ago. I've held dying teenagers in my arms, wondering how to tell a parent that their precious sweet daughter was a junkie and a prostitute. And I mean on more than several occasions. You betcha my belly was full of pretty boy preachers and singers and all the religious joke in America. I asked God to close every church in America and fix it so not one writer or preacher or singer could draw any funding whatsoever, unless he/she was making tents. Let's see then, how many would be so eager to preach and make the circuit, or write a book.....Come on now, I know somebody will say Amen!
Then suddenly on top of all that, the wife that I loved dearly died without warning from heart failure. And so in short, I felt cheated. I didn't want to be with anyone, including family, or friends, and especially churchers. I told God I would never preach again and never help anyone or anything, other than "Tater" my dog, my horses, and my loved ones.
Listen to me now!...I don't care who you are, it can happen to you. Was I lost and undone? No. Was I still a Christian?..You can bet your life on it!..But I was burned out and needed to hide in a cave or under a Juniper tree or somewhere away from it all, and so I did..Just me, my dog, my bitterness, and my memories. It was just us four and no more. So off to the beach we went. Sounds kinda like Peter doesn't it?...I imagine that he and I were closer at that time of my life than ever before. Tormented with memories of the past. Since that part of my life journey I have never criticized the man for his actions after he lost the love of his life.
And so came late September, maybe early October. Poppa had been there since the middle of February, Paloma (my wife)
had died January 10. The summer crowd was gone with the exception of a few stragglers, and I was glad of it. The winds were getting cooler and the clouds more threatening by the day and I loved it...You know, gloomy people love gloomy stuff, and will do their dead level best to make those around them just as gloomy as they are!....Somebody say either...Amen! or O'Me!..
Then early one morning about sunrise the clouds were suddenly gone and I could tell it was going to be a beautiful day, so I was sitting on my deck sipping coffee, watching the sun peep over the waves as they gently rolled into the shoreline. Listening to that sound that comes only from the ocean. I was really enjoying the peace and quiet, when I looked down the beach and saw an old woman walking with a staff in her hand. She had very long hair nearly down to her waist, as silver as a new quarter. Was wearing a long dress down to her ankles, she looked like a witch right out of the story books. I had never seen her before, but I could see she wasn't in a hurry and she was angling toward my place. I thought, what does this old geezer want? I don't feel like being jacked with, and was playing with the idea of putting my dog on her if she came to bother me. But as she drew nearer I could see the deep lines in her face and knew she was really old, her eyes were as blue as the sky and had a glow or maybe it was a gleam with a tender sweet story in them. She was like a song searching for music.
As she got closer to me I could hear her humming a tune I never heard before, it was captivating or almost Hypnotic to say the least. My dog laid down on the porch facing the old woman with his ears straight forward, as if he was being hypnotized along with me. I scooted my chair closer to the railing on the deck and listened. And then she began to sing, with a beautiful strong voice, much too strong for a woman her age. She stopped in front of my house and walked down to the water as she sang these words.
O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.
If that woman would have poured cold water in my face, it would not have shocked me or shook me anymore than she did. I fell to my knees and began to praise my God, my Saviour, my Lord. And His Holy Spirit breathed on me and, came alive in me and re-filled me to running over....I recognized the words she was singing after a few minutes, it was from the 139th Psalm and I had preached it many, many times.
When I got my wits about me I looked up and she was walking away, I called to her, she turned, raised her hand toward me and said, "God Bless You preacher have a good life, may peace be with you"...and she walked away, out of my life forever. I never saw her again and couldn't find anyone on the beach who knew her or even seen her before, and I wondered how did she know I was a preacher....
I boarded up the house, packed my bags, loaded Tater, and an old tom cat that had wandered up, and headed West for home.
Several years later I was preaching a campmeeting 25 miles north of the beach house, and I ask one of the preachers if he had ever heard of such a woman. He told me he knew her well, She had passed away a few years ago, and was a true blue saint if there ever was one. Her husband was an oldtime Methodist Preacher. But there was no way I could have ever met her because she was ninety seven years old at the time I was talking about, and almost totally blind. But he said "I heard the old woman sing the 139th Psalm 50 years ago. She claimed the Holy Spirit gave her the melody and it was the most hypnotizing thing I ever heard. In fact the day she sang it, was the day I was born again."
There are times in our lives when it seems to us we are experiencing more of God's absence than we are of God's presence. That was the experience which confronted Job. In the midst of his suffering he tried to lay his case before God. He goes forward and backward, to the left and to the right, seeking in every place to find God. To be sure, Job wants to find God because Job knows that he is an innocent sufferer, that he is an upright person. And since God is just, Job is confident that he would gain his acquittal, if only he could gain a hearing before God. But to Job's dismay, God seems to have moved and left no forwarding address. Therefore Job is moved to cry out, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!"
And you can trust me dear friend when I tell you, there are many of us who can say "amen" to Job's anguished cry when, in our time of trouble, it seems that God cannot be found...We hear the cry of the troubled Psalmist who said, "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, 'Where is your God?"...We hear the cry of the Hebrew exiles who had trouble finding God in the strange land of Babylon. They said, "By the Rivers of Babylon..there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.' How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?".....We hear the cry of the prophet Isaiah who said to God,
"Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior."...And then beloved, We even hear the suffering cry of Jesus on the cross when he cried, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"...That is scarcely a word which anyone would have invented and put on his lips. This is his own cry, feeling God's absence, identifying with the human cry of feeling oneself shut off from the face of God at the very time when God is needed the most...Indeed if that happened to Jesus himself, then it should not come as a surprise that it can happen to one of us in spite of our faithfulness. There can be troubled times when it seems that we can't find God and we can't find rhyme nor reason why.
I read somewhere of one of the weirdest auctions in history. It was held in the city of Washington, D.C. It was an auction of designs, actually patent models of old inventions that did not make it in the marketplace. There were 150,000 designs up for auction. There was an illuminated cat to scare away mice. There was a device to prevent snoring which consisted of a trumpet reaching from the mouth to the ear. One person designed a tube to reach from his mouth to his feet so that his breath would keep his feet warm as he slept. There was an adjustable pulpit which could be raised or lowered. You could hit a button and make the pulpit descend or ascend to dramatically illustrate a point. Obviously, at one time somebody had high hopes for each of those designs which did not make it. Some died in poverty, having spent all of their money trying to sell their dream. One hundred fifty thousand broken dreams! Is there anything sadder?
Dreams and visions are important in life. Every action we take in life was designed by someone. Every piece of clothing, every building, every hymn book, every chair, every light fixture, and every automobile existed first in someone's vision. Someone had to have the idea or the dream to turn out the product. The same holds true for the way we act. As Jesus said, "The eye is the seat of the body." If you cannot dream it, cannot envision it, then you simply cannot do it.
Dreams and visions can also be very crushing. Not all dreams come true. We invent certain images of ourself, certain pictures of the way life is supposed to be and then we are somewhat shocked at the way things do not turn out.
But when we feel alone and it seems that God has disappeared you can rest assured dear friends He knows where we are and can reach us when He gets ready.
If one stays in the Word of God for any length of time, one will discover, that in your sub-conscious mind, or inner Spirit, whichever you prefer. I like "Hidden Away In Our Heart." You will find that the Word by the Holy Spirit becomes hidden away in your heart. You may not be able to quote the chapter or verse and maybe not even the book, but it is there...
There is an old Hasidic tradition. You may have heard of it before. A large drop of honey is placed on the first page of the Torah the first time a Jewish child opens the Bible to read and study it. The child is instructed to lick the honey from the page, forever imprinting the young scholar with the memory-paste of pleasure, the conviction that the study of God's "Word" is sweet. And you can believe Poppa beloved when I tell you, His sweet Word will find you.
Sometimes when it appears to us that God has moved and left no forwarding address, it does not mean that God has abandoned us. It may only mean that even though we may not see God, God sees us and He is allowing us room for our faith to grow up. For faith has been defined in the New Testament as a conviction of a thing not seen....
Do you remember from your childhood the fairy tale about a wicked witch who turned the handsome young prince into a green, slimy, warty bullfrog sitting on a lily pad?..."You'll never be restored until a lovely princess comes along and kisses you on the lips!" she cackled....Well, what chance is there that will happen?....Yet one day a beautiful princess comes along the garden path, sees the ugly frog but instead of passing on by she looks again, this time deeper....She sees beyond all the ugly to the real need, and she kisses him....Slowly all the ugly falls away until the young handsome prince is restored....That's what Jesus does to us.
I look back over the years now and realize the old woman that I thought was a witch, was really the most beautiful woman in the world and she 'Kissed Me With Her Song'.
Sometimes He has to get us where He can wash our attitude, our hurt, our memory and restore our love for Him and His Church.
I have always liked the cliche,"Still Waters Run Deep"..Not.."Babbling Brooks." Because you see the rocks and pebbles are so far below the surface they no longer interfere with the flow.
That is what the work of the Holy Spirit does for us as Christians, He covers the rough places, the rocks of life, with very deep "Spirit Water," and we find we no longer are "Drifting through life on an Old Memory"...We will be Making New Memories!
Keep in mind Beloved, the book of Acts is still being written, and will be until the return of Jesus, and we are the writers.
Abba Father bless this Word to the hearts of your people...In Jesus Name I ask it!
God Bless You
Poppa
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jerryleekay@suddenlink.net
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