I laughed and cried at their first kiss: the joy and idealism, the love and dreams, the purity and beauty of real passion, unfettered by the shackles of free love that isn't really free. I cried like a lover who has found his love, because I have. But I cried like a dad, too. I cried for change, for this milepost that celebrates our own mortality, for the relentless march of time toward the end of our time. Beauty and change, dreams and dying were, in a strange way, wedded in one glorious event as we witnessed the vows of our young friends, "till death do us part." But what happens when death does part me from my lover or my lover from me? I used to fear loving because I feared the loss of the one I loved. I feared the pain and emptiness. I feared the aloneness. Maybe that's why I love weddings most: There's a love that cannot ever die, a Lover who vows even life—EVEN DEATH—cannot separate us. I can hardly wait for the wedding. #myellawasabeautifulbridesmaid@ella_flies_the_tango © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
0 Comments
High tide at Point Whitehorn tonight, and a bright seaweed necklace runs along the water's edge like confetti glistening in the sun. Incoming waves, unusually active for our inland passageway, beat a rhythm against the shore, and their retreat makes the little rocks sing a melody as they tumble and roll. It's the song of the borderland, where long ago, God drew a line: "...He assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress His command..." I, too, have a song in my borderland: Incoming waves pulse with deep rhythm, "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you"; their outrush rejoices with a thousand tinkling voices, "He has delivered . . . and He will deliver us. On Him we have set our hope that He will deliver us again." © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
They're growing so fast, these little cotton balls...but I wonder what it feels like to BE a rabbit. I wonder if, in the scale of their brief lives, it feels like the passage from birth to adulthood is an eternity, if it seems like they'll never get all their silky fur. I wonder if they wonder how long before they'll finally get a place of their own, away from siblings who always crowd their personal space... I look at life so differently: The day Rosemary jubilated over tiny red, hairless creatures buried in a nest was only three weeks ago. So soon they're transformed. Perhaps they wait in impatience—but I'm astounded at the speed of change, amazed at the differences day-by-day. To say it plainly, they just don't have a big enough perspective. They live in a rabbit-sized world and grow at a rabbit-pace. They'll have to trust me if they're to believe that soon enough really is. #rosemarysrabbits © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Enjoyed a private showing of my brother-in-law's powerful art in his own gallery in Mt. Vernon, Washington, then shared dinner with the artist. There's much more to these Skagit Valley inspired works than first meets the eye—more depth, more texture, more... But that "more" is achieved through reduction—by less. I'm thinking about the experience and realizing that many times we have to let go of something we thought valuable in order to gain what really matters. There's a little color in these pieces, but very little—instead we're confronted with the force of the images themselves, with depth of thought and medium, with the mind of the artist, with sweeping realities that might have been obscured by "more." Jesus said, "So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be My disciple." I like to accumulate, to add this to that—and I often come out with less, not more. But the truth is clear: It's in reduction that we experience the sweeping power of a power greater than our own. It's in loss that we gain. @christiancarlson7 @perryandcarlson © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Preparing for Sunday, studying for a message from Isaiah 40. Do you know how much water a man can hold in his cupped hand? By my measurement, it's about one tablespoon—and then it's leaking through my fingers and spilling over the edges. But God measures the waters of the earth in the hollow of His hand. To get a sense of what that means, consider that there are 187 quintillion gallons of water in the Pacific Ocean alone. Read that 187,000,000,000,000,000,000—then multiply by 256 and you have the number of times we'd have to dip a hand into this one ocean to measure it. And that's just an anthropomorphism to help us wrestle with infinity. Job, considering similar pictures of God, aptly exclaims: "Behold, these are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand?" (Job 26:14). © July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Twenty-three years ago today I married my bride. It seemed fitting today that we capture a memory of the occasion, however informal, so we asked Ella to man the camera and I selected a rural seat (read "the ground") where the light was relatively even and pleasant. I had pruned a massive rose bush just prior to the photo-shoot and the prunings made for a massive bouquet (read "colorful brush pile") with which our complicated set was complete. We sat down and realized that Andrew's dog, Lucy, was sprawled flat-out in the grass nearby looking far too much like a doggie-corpse and, unfortunately, was visible through the lens of the camera--so we called her to attention to make her look a little more attractive (read "less dead") in the photo. She happily obliged--and promptly decided she needed to get right between us. But being in the middle of the picture wasn't enough. She took to kissing my hapless bride (read "licking aggressively") while Ella, taking her job with utmost seriousness, snapped away behind the camera. I guess that's OK when you've been married for twenty-three years. But next year, I get to do all the kissing of the bride. Happy anniversary to my beloved Melissa! PS--Thanks for not kissing the dog back... © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Sauntered into the woods behind our house this afternoon looking for a quiet place. The drone of a neighbors mower filled the air and birds provided joyful punctuation to the song of summer. The quiet I was looking for wasn't really silence, anyway. I looked with pleasure on sunlight dappling the alder trunks beneath a luxuriant green canopy--and I talked in spurts with God who made all things. All things. I was impressed by the advance of an army of blackberries, thorny arms reaching out across tenuous paths to attack anyone passing by. But just as impressive was a stunning contrast: The aggressive vines were adorned with crepe-paper flowers of softest pink. In the center of each a myriad of stamens—like silken threads—rose with the grace of a crown fit for a fairy princess. Common things. They're all over the woods, these floral diadems. It's as though the King of Glory had such an abundance of it that He spilled it out and it pooled in lowly, ordinary places. It even snagged and collected on a thousand rampant blackberry vines in the forest behind the barn. #ordinaryglory #himalayanblackberries © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
When they start putting one candle on your cake for every decade, you know that you've racked up a few years. I blew out five candles on June 23. Here are some of the lessons I'm still learning as I start into my sixth decade. 1. I don't know as much as I thought I did.One of the things I've most enjoyed over the past several years is working with young men God has brought into my life. I've observed something very interesting about these guys: They may be fervent and earnest and committed and smart-as-a-whip--but they don't know what they don't know. I've started telling them (my own sons included): "Young men need gray hair." I well remember working with young people when I was just a young guy myself and having a dad tell me that he thought a traveling group I was sending out needed a chaperone. Like we weren't good enough. Like a twenty-something year old man wasn't really a full-on man. Exactly what part of adult was I NOT?! And now I know, because now I'm that dad. It's not that young men and women don't know a lot about life: Frankly there are plenty of areas in which they know more than I do or ever will. It's that they don't know what they don't know: They haven't felt their limitations or discovered their weaknesses or come to a place where they realized they are in over their heads. One thing is more dangerous than not knowing, and that's not knowing that you don't know. I'm learning that there are a whole lot of areas of life where I don't know. I'm not espousing an agnostic form of living--asserting that we can't know what we must know--but an honest humility that knows it's limits, a grace, born of experience, whose certainty is in God alone. 2. There are a lot of things I'm not good at.We define experience as learning what to do the next time we encounter a problem. But experience is equally the knowledge that the next time I encounter certain problems, I will still be inadequate to the task. To say it another way, experience teaches us both to get better at what we do on the basis of what we've already done AND to know our limits, the areas where we'll never be genius even if we encounter the same problem a thousand times. That doesn't mean that we can skip the parts of life we're no good at. Endurance is the capacity to walk in weakness, not expecting unaccountable success, but embracing unheralded humility and the joy of grace it brings. 3. Life is lived in little steps taken one at a time.Growth in life is a lot like early light on a summer morning: It steals into the room so softly that you don't even notice it at first. Then, in a moment, you become aware of blinding rays flooding the room with light, penetrating your heavy eyelids--A new day has dawned! But the day didn't begin just then with your conscious awareness of it. In fact, it's a little hard to say just when it started. The first gray twilight crept into the eastern sky hours ago, and little by little, the shadows emerged and the birds began to sing. The insignificant decisions--how to spend a pocket of free time, what to say when we're upset, whether to reach out and shake the hand of a stranger--these little things are the gray dawn of change, the first fingers of light in a new day. The change doesn't happen all at once; it's often imperceptible, as though nothing happened at all. But moment-by-moment the sun is rising and then, in a flash we awake to the reality that we are no longer the people we once were. New habits are formed; new character is developed; new loves are kindled. In western culture, we focus a great deal of attention on "decisions,"--and decisions are important--but it's fleshing out of those decisions out that really makes the difference. That animation doesn't take happen around a campfire when a fairy waves her wand and turns us from frogs to princes and princesses. In other words, it is good to determine, "I'm going to live for Christ from here forward!"--that's a good decision. But the process of change is likely to look petty: When we invest five minutes we could have squandered, when we bite our tongues instead of speaking our minds, when we reach out to people we don't know and don't know if we even want to know. 4. It's easier to talk about loving than to love.A long time ago Melissa and I wrote up the story of how God brought us together and titled it, "Learning to Love." It was true then, and it's true now. As we approach our twenty-third anniversary on this July 4th, we're still learning. It's easy to fall in love with love--to romance the rose-tinted ideals of caring and giving, of knowing and being known. It's another thing altogether to LOVE, because love is always associated with an object. We don't love in isolation. We love people--people with irritating habits and frustrating sins, people who don't always reciprocate the love we profess to have for them. We might say, "I'm not so good at loving people, but I sure love God!" The apostle John counters, "...he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen" (I John 4:20). Saying that we love God without having that love spill over onto the people He brings into our lives is evidence that we just love the idea of love. We think we love God because we have a warm, fuzzy feeling about a theory--but God is loving us through difficult people and challenging circumstances, pressing us to love in deed and in truth. When I was a young man, a good friend told me, "I'm just praying that you'll learn to love people." I hope he's still praying, because I'm still learning. © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
|
Archives
October 2017
|