GENDADS

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.

For those being intruded on by hackers, I apologize.  I am hiring a smart blogger to fix the problem.  Please be patient.

FIRST, IT WAS THE LORD’S “STILL, SMALL VOICE”(See comment below).

THEN IT WAS THE DEVIL’S TURN…Or was it?  You probably noticed.  I got hacked.  Messed up my rigid plans for the day.  BUT it got me back into this blog.  I’ve been planning that for over a week.   Or is that spelled, “weak?”  I ‘spect I’m being prodded by the Lord to re-enter the blog world as part of the mission to pick up my book writing.  Been away all summer helping son-in-law start his business. It’s actually a ministry of reaching out to families in chaos by way of equine assisted therapy on Deep Rivers Family Ranch.

At the beginning of the summer I wrote:  SUDDENLY, THE LORD WHISPERED LOUDLY…”Take a break, son.”  He was refering to my time on my blog and social media.  He reminded me He wrote His Book, and now I should write mine.

SO FOR MY VISITORS OVER THE FIRST HALF OF OCTOBER:  This is a perfect place for a static page.  It introduces the book and a bit of our life touched, incredibly, by grace uncommon.  Feel free, however, to leave a comment (tap “comments,” above).]

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Per the blog header, the focus  of GenDads is pretty clear.  It’s about “generational fathering,” the concept of promoting multiple generations participation in the fathering challenge.  If the goal is “good and godly” children as lights of hope and righteousness in a darkening future, then the father and the father’s father would be a better set of tools to hammer out that sort of legacy.

One thing is obvious.  Like other “obvious” truths, we need reminding: it’s not the quantity (as in two complementing generations) but the quality of both that will assure the quality of the newest and very challenging generation being molded.

See the cute, happy couple? If the photo is 46 years old, does “happy” continue (even if “cute” is long gone)?  It’s a serious question.  The handsome Navy flyboy has wrinkles, white hair, and a protruding belly now.  But it  is the quality of his life–and his  “Happy Couple” marraige–that determines the quality of imprint “Popi” will have on his grandchidren.

This weekend Sunday service forces this issue.  You see, Carolyn (the still “cute” and obviously better half) and I were asked to share our testimony and given the entire message slot.  We would never have guessed (and still are a bit dazed) the overwhelming event that would become.  It was not the 46 years of walking with God together done in 40 minutes, but the entire week it took for us to forge Our Story from memory and pictures.  Tears, smiles, awed silence and shaking our heads in wonder as we reviewed each segment of the journey.

Reviewing our life under the Utterly Gracious Hand of a Loving God has changed us.  Our life forward will be different.  The “Finishing Well” phase of life  (like a race, a poem, a painting, a landscaping project…heck, like anything of worth) depends what’s been invested, hammered, built, tested, sacrificed (etc., etc.,) in early stages.  We were overwhelmed (I mean that; really, we were swept up in the wonder of it) at the amazing and unearned grace of God to have favored us so.  I type through tears even now.

This could be a very long post.  Or it could stop here.  Or maybe I should hit the “pause” tab for now.  I think over the next couple of days, with writing Generational Fathering highest on my priority list, I’ll take time on GenDads to share the highlights of that journey.  WHY?  Back to the “quality” thing in leaving a legacy imprint on my generations to follow. The quality of God’s grace is never in question.  How we appropriated it–that alone a mystery of unmetited grace–is the essence of how my life (amplified by my still-cute better half) will imprint these six grandchildren I so dearly love.

AND YOU?  HOW WILL THE WORK OF GOD IN YOUR LIFE UP ‘TIL NOW IMPACT YOUR LIFE ONWARD..AND THOSE HE GIVES YOU TO LEAD, INCLUDING THE GENERATIONS TO FOLLOW FORWARD?

Just can’t help my self.  Now, THAT is significant.

The response to tracking the difference between “success” (every solid American’s standard of worth) and “significance” (those imprints that are found deep in the hearts and lives of others and cascade to ongoing generations) has been instructive.  AND it has reinvigorated my own journey.  It is always open to tweeking. 

Navy LT “JV” teaching sailors in a church basement.  Can you tell it’s an old picture?  Any thing significant?  You’ll see.

“Significance” is now my mantra, will probably be so until some concept more engaging comes along.  Matt (co-author and soninlaw) offered “worship” as the cornerstone upon which significance is built.  Ok, but not the “act of worship.”  It’s a life focus of worship of the Lord God, the One to whom all signficance will be address and Who will judge it in the end.  How’s your life of worship coming?  Significant?

But let me offer one more piece.  It came from a senior Navy chaplain to the Marines, a friend who knows his way around the church, the military and real combat, and the family.  Ollis Mozon simply quoted a Chief of Chaplains.  It stuck with him, now it sticks with me. 

Read on slowly and take in these simple wise words. More

Am a bit under conviction regarding  what is popularly known as the giving season.  As if often the case, as announced by Jesus with a bunch of kids on His lap, “A child shall lead them.”   So, my grandkids, who we visit for the long holiday season, gave me a really good idea to pass on to you. 

It started last year…TO THEM.  Every evening around Christmas, the twelve before, to be exact, there was a knock at the door.  Everyone got excited, kids ran from everywhere in the house.  At the opened door was a gift, an ANONYMOUS gift; first with one, eventually with 12 items.

It’s good to copy a good thing.  So, this became our “Christmas Serving Venture.”  I’m writing this is in our daughter’s very small town near the famous Capital Reef National Park, Bicknell, Utah.  About 300 people.  My kids know most all of them, of course.  About nine pm or so tonight, four of the five grandkids will stuff themselves and their excitment and their ninth gift of nine things into our little Chevy for “the ride.”  We drive across town, a little crazy and fun stuff, turn off the lights a block away, creep along with kids finishing their laugh-decorated version of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” (Let see, ”…six cans of soda, five chocolate candies, four rolls of toilet paper…” etc.   They lay the box or bag or ZipLock on the steps, bang on the doublewide door. “Knock, knock, knock” and lickity split they all run like crazy to the darkened car laughing and yelling, “Hurry Popi!  Go!  Go!  Before they see us!”       

They have picked one family; they are fellow homeschoolers in town and very likely the poorest.  I’m the getaway driver. 

No telling what nine things we’ll load into a shopping bag tonight.  Last night it was eight very flat, very tasty Toll House cookies they made themselves without much flour.  Flat, hard, deliciously addictive.  A note from the “Christmas Angels” is different each day.  They make it; mostly the 12 yold.  It is the giving, not the gift.  Bottom line: giving and the joy and the fun of it.

Midst the so-called giving, the traditional kind in the commercial and cultural Christmas season, are you really giving?  You know what I mean.  SERVING, GIVING OF YOURSELF, maybe even sacrifice something you prize (your time, your quiet, your solitude), for someone else.   The Christmas Angels are going out of their way only a little, making it an event, having fun, and enjoying their picture of the other family enjoying, laughing, anticipating.

SO, I WONDER…It’s not too late to get the family into the act…the act of blessing and giving someone who would not be expecting the gift or the giver.  JESUS DID IT THAT WAY.  HAVE YOU BEGUN SERVING YOUR NEIGHBORS FOR CHRISTMAS YET?  

 AND DON’T FORGET:  2 Corinthians 9:11
You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

SO BIG, SO STRONG…BUT HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP BALANCE, MARGIN, GRACE?

On one of those personal notes people like, I’m sitting in our DVS (Distinquished Visitors Suite) at Nellis AFB, Las Vegas. Carolyn and are are in route to the kids and the grandwonders we loaned them. Am up way early and simply enjoying catching up on emails and suantering over to friends blogs.

There is a point to this as Carolyn stirs in our swanky suite. I was hoping Jesus was busy already and wouldn’t get back to me about the question on the trail with Matt and Taylor on the Rite of Passage hike. “Over these 60 years of my Walk with you, have I pleased you, Jesus?” When He offered three illustrations of His pleasure and three of His “not so much,” I thought, to myself (do you see how funny that is…I was chatting with Jesus), “I can survive this…I wonder where He’ll go.”

So far so good. But then He started out, “So, Gary, if I said ‘flotsam and jetsam’ in the same sent sentence with ‘energy’ and ‘wake,’ can you guess where I’m taking this.”

YIKES, He’s not going there, is He?

He was. If I could only rewind for a redo first. All He had to say was “Casablanca, Morocco…” and I knew He was homing in on “IT”.

AND WHAT COULD “IT” POSSIBLY BE? MORE

I love it when Jesus laughs.  Those serious authors of the Gospels left out a lot, I think.  Because as we trudged the trail upward (hey, it’s not fair; He had sandles and wasn’t even huffing), He reared His head back with this great, almost raucus laugh when He described one of His favorite memories of me.  Suddenly it became mine.

 Strange, though.  It was deeply painful at the time.

Rather than the tomes it’d take to describe the fire that destroyed our garage and much more, I’ll just sum it up but tell you about Jesus’s take on my and my bride’s reaction.

JESUS, WHAT COULD BE SO FUNNY ? MORE

LOOKIE ME!  I RUN, I DANCE, I STRUT…(for Jesus?)

This one caught me off guard even though I anticipated it. My jaw tightened a little and I noticed I was not looking at Him, but at the trail, not ahead, but at my boots. “Gary, the list of examples I could use for this particular area of your life that didn’t please me is long. I know you know what I’m about to say. It makes both of us sad. But at the time, I was the only sad One.

“You thought–no, you assumed–you were doing My will. But you didn’t stop often enough to check it out with me. Let’s see, how many names can we use to describe this one? There’s ‘busyness,’ of course, and… HOW HE LABELED MY MISGUIDED SERVICE

It’s Veteran’s Day.  We’ll take a break from the mountain trail.  Jesus won’t mind.   

My heart is light but the rims around my eyes seem reservoirs.  TV news features, emails from friends, a visit by a fellow vet in my church.

What a difference a few years makes. Veterans are actually thanked with uncommon frequency and sincerity…”Thanks for your service.” And they mean it. The tears come freely in remembrance of my son and my brother; brother in a Navy fighter crash, my son of cancer probably contracted handling heavy metals as an Air Force bomb squad tech. 

Take a think. Our Millennial kids and grandkids only know two dimensional wars on TV news and Xbox. When they hear the real life version from dad, uncle, granddad, it’s a different story.  In fact, “story” is the issue.

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