A Life Well-lived and A Mystery #T

Saturday morning I traveled to a city some fifty miles distant to attend the funeral of a very dear friend.  Although Howard was 86 years of age I cannot shake the feeling that he is gone too soon.  Good friends are all too few and they are leaving much too often these days.

I remarked to the grieving widow that Howard no doubt had more friends than anyone else I know for he worked at being a friend.  It was no surprise that friendship was a recurring theme of the memories-- that and Howard's unwavering love for Jesus and his desire that his friends would all come to know Him.

On the drive home I chose to take a route which I had driven day after day some six decades ago, for I lived in that town back then and drove twelve miles to work each day.   As I passed the little country church, three miles to go to reach the school where I had taught-- I started picturing the lay of the land as I had known it back then.  Coming up on the right and a mile before reaching the old school there would be the beautiful Bedford stone house which I had almost coveted in my youth.  What more could one want?  I thought it the epitome of design in residential structures and it was nearly new, having been built a mere half-dozen years before.   Abiding therein was a family who were patrons of the district, prosperous farmers, hard workers, who had two beautiful little flaxen-haired girls who attended our school.  Patty was in my homeroom, she as smart and capable and industrious as one might hope a sixth grade child to be.

There it is.  Same limestone house, same location.  And yet it looks so much smaller than I remembered it, possibly a thousand square feet, probably two bedrooms.  But that was not what most startled me.  The house was abandoned and clearly had been for some time.  The yard was overgrown not only with grass and weeds, but with scrub bushes. Sorry, bedraggled, and forgotten.

There on my left is the cemetery, then School in a Soybean Field apparently also deserted.  I drove on, pondering the fate of the inhabitants of the house I had once admired.  Why?  What happened? Where were those charming little girls now, little girls who would be in their sixties?  Things I'll never know.  The twists and turns that life takes are often imponderables in the broad scheme of things.

But I still wonder.

Howard Barefoot, 1932 - 2018  RIP

Redeem the Time #T

Monday morning BBBH left the premises with the announcement that she was "going shopping; I'll see you when I see you."

This rather left me at loose ends in an empty house.  Oh, I did have a load of laundry in the washer and a load in the dryer, so I was destined to have a few minutes of productive time.  What else to do?  Ah, peanut butter cookies.  I ripped a recipe from a BH&G that was lying around and gathered the required ingredients.

I do not cook, but Beautiful tells me (often) "If you can read, you can cook."  I'm not about to let that dictum reach the stage of verification, but I don't mind making cookies or candy on occasion, and I have been know to bake a cake now and then.

The details would only bore you, thus it is sufficient to say that the cookies were baked, the kitchen cleaned up, and the laundry folded by the time the spouse arrived home.

What a good boy am I.

The point?  Surely not to fish for your approbation or admiration.  But go ahead, if you wish.  Rather it is this.  I was thinking of an expression, probably biblical¹, which my father used quite often.  "Redeem the time," he would say.  I suspect, looking back through the tunnel of time, that often his point was simply that I was a sluggard, or at best I was wasting good time which might be better utilized.  When I was twelve, fourteen, seventeen, or whatever, I suspect that I had little enough grasp of the true value of the time we are allotted.  I may have taken his words as chastisement and received them with resentment on occasion.

That is one of the problems of youth.  In our youth, we have the strength and stamina for the tasks set before us, but we haven't the good sense to recognize the gift we have received in having been granted time.²

Now, Dad is gone and the time remaining to me is rushing past like a foehn wind down the east slope of the Rockies.  I have neither the strength nor the stamina, I have too little time.  What I have is the wisdom that comes with experience,³ but not time enough to avail myself of the benefit of that wisdom.

So, in an effort to "redeem the time," I may just bake more cookies, read more poetry, take more pictures.  Well, it's a thought.

¹Ephesians 5:15-17
²Teenagers, sadly, are immortal in their own eyes.
³BBBH says it is true we learn by experience; but, we will never have that experience again.  So what do we do with the lesson learned?