Dec. 28--sleepless night

I said on my last blog I'd tell you about the rest of last week, and since time has already warped into another week, I guess I'd better get at it. It is past five in the early morning of December 28, I have been awake since 2:41, and I've pretty well exhausted any means of getting to sleep. I had a classical station playing and was making progress, but then the boring music ended and some piercing soprano got airtime, and that ended that. I've also been reading Larry Woiwode (pronounced "Why-woody"), but his memoir of life in a North Dakota winter is slowly freezing me to death, and I've got to do something else.

(You know what they say about the cold in North Dakota--"It keeps the riff-raff out.")

The week was pretty slow for four days after last Sunday. I burned a lot of energy on Sunday, including watching a doomded football game ("doomded" a phrase from a semi-literate baseball player in a novel called "Bang the Drum Slowly"), and I was lethargic, fatigued; and so I just puttered around the house working on cleaning projects. Friday I got some energy back, and I went after a big project--cleaning out a closet full of magazines, most of them train magazines. Thirty years accumulation is a bit much, but I got the job done--weeded out about two-thirds of them, hauled them off to the landfill. I ran across some other magazines, notably "Books and Culture," and saved most of them. But the closet is considerably cleaner than it was.

Back to Woiwode, whose mother died when he was nine. He sealed off a childhood's worth of memories, which it took him a decade or better to recover, and now he recalls years by specific ages from each of four different children. I have one child and am not capable of that.

It seems to me that time fades rapidly into some huge, black mist, that the only access I have to it is now and maybe a three-month window backwards, and that beyond that it's simply gone. Of course, I remember things from my childhood and young adulthood quite clearly, but once you get to 1986, my only signposts are years at the post office and what I was doing there. (Maybe I was born to be a mailcarrier!)

So all I have is God, and me, and a few months. I'm sure the memories are safe with him.

I am going back to work, parttime, on the fifth of January. I'm ready for that.

Back to Woiwode again--he's set up this huge outside wood-burning furnace, and hasn't even gotten it completely installed when the worst winter in years descends on him. I am intimidated, first of all, by the mechanical tasks he performs, and secondly, by the winter itself and the lack of electricity, which is going to kill them all if the co-op doesn't get it turned back on. But the co-op itself could get some people killed trying to fix it in the blizzard. Which takes me back to the middle of Romans 8 and the messed-up universe we're living in. But Paul says creation itself is waiting for the "freedom of the glory of the sons of God," and I believe that with all my heart.

It is now 5:52--I'm going to proof this, then go back to bed, get up, worship, eat Korean food, drive my daughter to a winter retreat on the southeastern side of Greensboro, and (hopefully!) go look at a used pickup in Advance.

The big word in that whole sentence is this--worship!

--Sayonara, Chuck Eggerth

P.S.--I was going to tell you about one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 73. I call it "confessions of a knucklehead", but a real knucklehead wouldn't have told us about it. Asaph gets himself freaked out by looking at wicked people who prosper. But then he goes to the sanctuary (remember what I said about worship?) and God shows him the truth, and he starts telling it to us, about how he was a brute beast in God's presence as long as his delusion persisted. And here are the verses I've memorized: "Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."

Amen.

P.P.S.--I forgot to tell you something God taught me this week. It was Thursday and I had been dithering all week about figuring out the computer stuff--e-mails to word documents, creating a blog, etc., and then Alison and I spent nearly three hours and got it all done. But when I reviewed the day that evening in bed, I was still stressed--this time about some other foolish item. And I realized I needed to repent of this blamed worrying, that worrying had actually become an idol. And I did, which hooked me up to the Holy Spirit again and got me out of my "brute beast" condition. Today, of course, it was something else to worry about; but I'm making progress.