My life as a great writer/yardman

First, scientists have done it again.

Today’s Seattle Times reports the discovery of a mammal, a rockrat, which they thought had been extinct for 11 million years.

A biologist in Laos saw the creature being sold as groceries in a meat market. No, not as a fossil but as food.

Again, I’m reminded that my novel Glog may be realer than I thought when I wrote it. Who knows what’s living in the bushes?

You can read the rockrat article at (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002855664_rockrat10.html

Here's a photo of one, looks delicious for a fossil:

Thursday I spent the day mowing and doing yard work instead of writing.

Ginny has all these dirt-eating plants that she has me lug in and out of the house according to temperature or wifely whim. She decided to re-pot the things so I left off writing my history of firefighting in Jacksonville to chop bushes and mow grass under her adult supervision.

How can I produce great literature behind a lawnmower?

Can you imagine Chaucer mowing grass? How could he have written Cranberry Tales if he had to push a mower?

Does Stephen King mow his own lawn? No! I imagine he has little people to do mundane things like that. Of course his little people have fangs and only come out a t night.

Did Dante mow grass? Did Hemmingway? Not a chance; he just drank and let it grow.

I mean can you picture Truman Capote pushing a lawnmower all hot and sweaty, wearing black socks and tennis shoes with his shorts and wearing no shirt…

Maybe it’s best not to picture that.

No wonder my books never make the best seller list.

But, I’ll have to confess that it’s while mowing the lawn that I get most of my thinking and praying done. For me it’s easier to pray while doing some mindless, repetitious task; I let my hands do the work while my heart focuses on the Lord.

Unfortunately, Thursday my mind focused on an unpleasant aspect of Christianity:

Christians tend to shoot their own wounded.

We’re inclined to blame victims for their misery and make painful situations worse, to hurt the hurt worse than they’re already hurt.

That’s a shame.

Back in the First Century the apologists defending the faith against Nero’s paganism would point to the lives of Christians as proof of the truth of our religion.

Justin Martyr, a Christian apologist writing about the year A.D. 150, said, “Many (pagans) changed their violent and tyrannical disposition, being overcome either by the constancy which they witnessed in the lives of their Christian neighbors, or by the extraordinary forbearance they have observed in their Christian fellow travelers when defrauded, and by the honesty of those believers with whom they have transacted business.”

I don’t know that I’d want anybody pointing at my life, constancy, forbearance or honesty if they were arguing that Christians should not be fed to lions.

Nowadays we tend to shoot our own wounded.

Case in point, about ten or 12 years ago a young pastor came to our house. He ministered at a church of a different denomination from mine; we’d met and became acquainted at an interdenominational feed the hungry drive but I hardly knew the man.

I was out mowing grass when he stopped by unexpectedly, so we sat on our back deck as he hemmed and hawed over small talk working up courage to ask me something.

Poor bastard was worried sick.

He’d done something which he worried may have exposed him to AIDS and he was feeling this horrible itching and he was scared shitless that he had it and he was scared that if anybody in his church found out they’d fire him and that his deacons would ostracize him and other pastors in his group would brand him as a vile nasty sinner and he his physician was a member of his board and he would die in shame and all the people who looked up to him would ….

Well, you get the idea.

Somehow at the food drive, he’d got the idea that I would not whack him with an ax if he came to talk to me.

Now, I’m not a pastor, counselor or professional Christian of any sort, but the guy felt he could talk to me while he was worried sick over all this.

Now, I’ll admit that I feel the thing he’d done was sin.

Big deal.

I said, “Bill, you’re a pastor so you know more about handeling the sin side of things than I do. So do what you know about that. Christ is Deliverer and a delivery man takes things from where they are to where they ought to be.”

That’s about all I had to say about the sin part of his unfaithfulness.

But I made arrangements for him to be tested for AIDS by a state agency; he did not know that this could be done anonymously. Turns out he had scabies not AIDS!

Wow. What a happy camper.

He was so relieved. And his deacons would not find out. Or his wife. Or his congregation. Or even his physician (who was a member of his church).

I advised him to “Go and sin no more. Stick with your own wife and leave that other woman alone unless you want to feel that way again”.

I have no idea if he did or not.

Having revealed his affair, his anxiety, and his relief to me, he became embarrassed and withdrew from contact.

That’s ok.

It’s what we do.

The thing is, it’s such a shame that he was so scared of his fellow Christians, that they’d turn on him instead of dealing with sin honestly and supporting the guy.

I mean we’re all in this boat together and … don’t know how to finish this.

Anyhow, that’s the sort of thing I thought about while mowing the grass.

Today, I'll be clearing a fence line -- again, under adult supervision.