GENDADS

So, what do I do now? Better yet, what would YOU DO? Even better still, what would you BE THINKING, MUSING, PLANNING, PRAYING now?.

I’m cool, even strangely excited, about sitting here in Starbucks waiting for my bone and CT scans. You may know those to be cancer tracking proceedures.

Speaking of “cool,” that’s what everything was last visit. I’d shifted from the Urologist to the Oncologist. Oh-oh. But she said, “You don’t need no stinking chemo.” (Well, maybe not in such street terms). That was two months ago. In six days she sees me again with today’s scans. HMMmmm. NEVER assume. NEVER take God’s gifts and blessing for granted.

Think about this in your own life. Doesn’t have to be cancer, health, or seeking God’s wondrous will. It could be something small. Yesterday is but a taste of tomorrow, and there are no guarantees of healing, even tranquility. Momentum is not a heavenly concept. For those walking with Jesus, who, after all, is the Lord God incarnate, the future is now; it’s how you walk with, trust in, depend on, love Him NOW.

So, do I count on the cancer being held at bay, maybe conquered? Nope. But I do know this, and I pass it on to you. What is, is. And it is He who IS, the “Great I AM.” Count on it. So will I be anxious next Wednesday? Maybe a scosh. Like you, wondering if God wants that loan to go through, that sort of stuff. We get the answer and move on knowing each step, like each moment, belongs to Him and it is He, the Lord God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, who treats us to His will at each point.

May I get religious for a moment? (The cowboy lost on a rugged trail and counting on Toffee to carry him home is surely a creationist thanking God for smart horses and His sovereignty). This is too common, so don’t take it for granted, please. Think of it in the context of wild, wild Peter who, recovering from his moral failure was going to conquer the world for his Master:
2 Peter 3:11-13(Msg)Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life? Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival.

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No, I’m not dying.  Well, yes, I am, but so are you.  I mean my cancer is there, but so am I; healthy, strong, no affects other than the entertaining issues from the femine hormones (prone to hug, spending extra time in Khols, hot flashes).  Still, there is this thing about the path of life.  I, of course, think in terms of “The Trail.’   Many a trail on the back of Toffee (who preceeded me last year into Horse Heaven), many a ride along rich and challenging sections with Matt.  We peel off and head down our own trails, always within shouting distance, always following the Wild Goose, always ready to reign strong and ride hard over to the other’s call.

Along the trail are the cairns (rocks stacked in such a way as to guide the next rider, invaluable when maps, trail markers, and overgrown trails cloud the journey).  We follow some, we leave some.

This is a short post leading to a longer one in my personal blog (this being more a dads and book blog) The Wild Gray Goose.  Before you jump over there ( I recommend you do), I want you to catch a “bottom line” idea.  Saves you all my poetic meanderings.  We ALL need heart–partners.  We need comrades, amigos, saddle mates, partners who will stand beside us for God’s sake and ours.   SEAL Team Six is a TEAM.  And they do their missions in pairs.  I flew with a wingman, never alone in combat.

Life, because of the Fall and subsequent invasions of our lives by the Enemy of Our Souls, is warfare.  We need trusted companions.  The new movie, Act of Valor (active duty SEALs as “actors”), will emboss that on your psyche.  Ephesians 6:12 will take your understand where it ought to go…the battle is in the heavenlies but touches down in our lives sometimes subtly, sometime dramatically.  The battle is not ours, it’s His.  Our heart/life/trail mates are cruicial.

Oh, one note more.  My grandsons (and soon the granddaughters) are being conditioned to the trail ahead and its difficult sections.  Through Matt and I (the team, co-fathering theme again) taking them up to and through a rite of passage; boot camp for those who would ride and fight well…but never alone.  We provide two generations of savvy companionship.  And when I go, Matt and each of them will repeat the cycle; a legacy of preparing for the long ride on life’s trail and the battles and joys thereupon, one cairn followed by another.

And now, you’ll better understand the meaning of my view of the trail in The Wild Gray Goose.

 

 

 

 

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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

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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.

 

 

 

 

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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.

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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?

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