GENDADS

That’s me.  I went deep this morning following the Wild Goose.  I actually wrote, yes wrote, as in hand writing, in my journal.  It framed my day.  Following the Holy Spirit, known as the Wild Goose by my Celtic forefathers, is both wild and wonderful.  I provide the gray.  Take a visit to my journal and get a short profile of following the Winged and Wonderful Creature  www.newseason.us

My place-holding blog entry is waaay too old.  Good reason, though.  Interesting, but are you interested?  Maybe not, so here’s the nutshell version so’s I can get on with fortifying the bridge so I can cross back over.

I loved blogging.  I loved a whole bunch more in life, too.  Hard to balance.  So, with the major focus being the rite of passage for my olderst grandson behind me, I took the bridge across to “LayLoLand”.  Been helping soninlaw, Matt, get started in his new professional-business-as-ministry, Deep Rives Family Ranch.  MAN! is that exciting.  It’s like passing the baton from our years of ministry to the newer gen better able to handle the peculiarities and demands of current family status in our nation.  DRFR is a whole-family crisis intervention therapy ranch.  Did I get enough words in there to help you figure it out?  It’s finding wonderful response in the therapy community and in the lives of those families Matt is touching.

After a summer at their new ranch site in Colorado (in the mountains above and west of Grand Junction), Carolyn and I are back home in SoCal catching our breath AND setting out on the new stage of priorities: 1) enjoy each other and the remaining life God grants us (see next paragraph), 2) Re-start Generational Fathering (after five months idle) and start with notes for Carolyn’s and my life memior (“Our Extraor dinary Journey:  Stories of Following Jesus Up Mountain Peaks, Through Valleys, and Out of Quick Sand”) 3) continue prayer and marketing support for Deep Rivers Family Ranch, 4) increase our personal witness and serve our Chapel congregation well.

By the way, the above is in the context of my advance prostate cancer.

So, what’s the bridge analogy that require re-crossing?  Life is short (and shorter by each year I enjoy God’s grace), Life is Hard, Life is Unfair, and Its End is Uncertain.  That’s the Engineer’s label on the bridge abuttment.  The bridge has been named the “Finish Well” bridge.  I’m crossing it again with even more enthusisam than what characterizes my life to date.

And I remember daily two motto’s.  One took me into college with faith the my future was in His hands, “‘Tis one life, ’twill so be passed, only what’s done for Christ will last.”  Then the motto on the cornerstone of Wheaton College that sent me out from that wonderful, life-framing institution, “For Christ and His Kingdom”.

Sorry I can’t fancy this up with the normal photo’s and graphics.  I’ve been too long away to remember how. For now, I just want my GenDads pals to know I’ll be back on the keyboards.  Soon grandson #2 will be entering his year of passage.  You’ll get some of those pieces and a bit of my Finish Well Journey.

My personal blog, Wild Gray Goose, has some personal refelction of life, cancer, and serving The One upon Whom all is centered.

Very difficult days for the writer in me.  Daily posted in Christmas week.  Loved it.  Good response.  Then several days of travel from the kids to SoCal.  Distractions in reorganizing life back home; a holiday of sorts from writing.

Getting back to the writing cycle is hard.  Cycle?  Writing comes from the heart, filtered through the head and all that goes on in there.  If it’s a passion, good writing makes it way throught the guantlet.  Despite distractions, detours, roadblocks, and speedbumps the heart makes its way through the keyboad.

And did I forget to say the pc that supports that keyboard can be a detour?  Not like ink drying on the quill or the lead breaking, a dying laptop is an “overthe cliff” detour !  Three full days only partially recovering a crashed computer.  Took an hour just to get back up on GenDads this morning and the loss of my email address book means I’m drifting. 

PC-less just days before I finally launch my “Writing Getaway,” four days a week away writing “Generational Fatheirng” ’til it’s done.  Forced into wrestling with life and writing issues, I’m forced to inventory and re-assess.  Entering a new cancer protocol, missing my extraordinary grandchildren, and sharing extreme health conditions of my wife; this stuff makes you think.  Such is the winding road from heart through head through keyboad.

Why is this worth posting?  Some of you are readers, some are writers.  Whichever, I pose you the question.  Is there something down there worth pushing and pulling through those detours?   If you’re a writer do you just write head stuff ?  If a reader, do you have anything down there worth delivering if you did have the writing habit?  Why not write something to someone, even yourself, when you come up with an answer.

Footnotes at Christmas are usually good things.  Stories about finding just the right gift, “Oh, that reminds me what I got when I was ten,” and, in my case, why the lump of coal.

Our family has a sad footnote.

It’s like the footnotes that will found for the first time this year–and for all the years to come–by the father and mother, maybe wife and children, are going to be without their Marine, their fireman, their policeman.

I’m writing at 7 am, Christmas eve.  About three hours from now will be the anniversary of  “The Call”.

Son, Darick, called to tell us, “No, it isn’t pneumonia after all.  Guys, the doc tells me it’s fourth stage lung cancer.”  Christmas was not merry. Symbolically, Darick’s journey, took him from Christmas to Easter.  Then, with all of us gathered to watch the ceremony, seen in its purest form only from Heaven, Darick left us to join the Christ Child who’d become the Resurrected Savior.

But there is another footnote.  A really uplifting one; it’s the one that makes us smile through the sadness that will be ten years on its journey three hours from now.  I just wrote about this yesterday in my personal blog, The Wild Gray Goose.  The tears seem barely dry as they form again this morning.  Yet the story is a classic “happily ever after” one.  You see, under dad’s nudging months before the Christmas eve announcement, Darick read “Sacred Romance” (Curtis and Eldredge).  It was his return from the detour.  By Millennial Eve (that’s Jan 31, 1999), Darick Scott Taylor was pronouncing profound truths freshly discovered.  He left that indelible imprint as family and friends circled the huge fireplace of our log home on the ranch, heavy snow flakes falling, lighted  by the deck lights: “I wish I’d known my whole life what I know now.  But this I do know, that if Jesus were to visit and offer me freedom from cancer but I’d have to give up the life I now have with Him, I’d take the cancer in a heartbeat.”

Now THAT is a footnote!  It lightens the load of the sadness that never goes away, it reminds us what the focus in life’s short–very short–journey is all about, it paints a smile beneath the tears that will not be wiped away until done by Jesus’ tender carpenter’s hand.  Maybe He’ll let Darick do it.

HOW ABOUT YOU?   Are you prepared as Darick was for the Ceremony that ends the Sacred Romance and the  BEGINS an eternal life of indescribable marriage bliss?  It is the point of the courtship, you know.

AND, FOR THOSE WITH TOO WET OR TOO WHITE A CHRISTMAS, MAY I POSE A WARM CHRISTMAS ON THE BEACH SOMEWHERE?