We’re Back And Still Happily Married

To celebrate our 39^th Anniversary, Ginny and I traveled about 200 miles to Seminole State Park in southwestern Georgia. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

A few duties involving a neighbor’s heart attack threw our timing off for starting our trip; I helped in a very minor way, but he’s recovering nicely anyhow.

Once we did get underway, we stuck to back roads enjoying the rural countryside and the small towns we passed through.

One abrupt physical limitation surprised me. I expected to cruise all the way in one marathon driving stretch but my arthritis pain, which is always in the background, kicked in so bad that that I could not drive even 50 miles without stopping. When we were young and driving the truck cross country, I used to drive 500 miles a night without giving it a thought.

I thought I still could.

I can’t.

What a shock.

I have scads of photos to post but my Contribute software keeps giving me an Access Denied message, so those will have to wait till our son, Donald, doctors up the web server so it will let me in.

Each day we were gone Ginny and I went for long walks. We strolled around the verge of a placid lake, hiked to a beaver pond, balanced our way across rickety boardwalks above the swamp, and viewed wildlife and autumn foliage.

We hoped to see some of the rattlesnakes, gators and gopher tortoises for which the park is famous…

No snakes.

No gators.

And only one tortoise. This substantial beast, Georgia’s state reptile, stood on a mound outside its burrow by a paved road until I got the camera out. Then it scuttered underground. Four times on different days I tried to sneak up to snap it’s picture. The creature always moved underground before I could photograph it… To be outrun by a tortoise says something about my speed.

However…

While standing on a bridge above a swamp, I got this photo of a giant snapping turtle swimming underwater about 30 yards away. You can’t grasp the size from my cropped photo but this turtle’s shell is bigger around than a car tire:

I’m so proud of getting this long-distance photo of the monster:

Of course, we did not spend all our anniversary time tramping through the woods. The immaculate cabin we stayed in featured comfortable rockers on a porch overlooking an arm of the massive lake. So we watched birds from the comfort of our rockers. We saw a family of unfamiliar ducks and a pair of Canadian Geese feeding right at our door. And we watched red-winged black birds flit from reed to reed, and an osprey divebomb fish from a nearby pine.

We rocked and talked for hours and hours on end. We never run out of things to talk about, although sometimes we do spend hours on end without speaking. We’re comfortable being silent together.

One of the nicest features of our vacation was having time for uninterrupted reading.

I read a book on archeology in Denmark, one on ghost towns of Georgia, a book about travels in London, and two murder mysteries.

Besides those books, in the New Testament I read Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. Hardly understood a word in any of the three letters. That doesn’t bother me greatly. Paul’s letters hardly ever make sense to me. If St. Peter said St. Paul’s letters contain “Some things hard to be understood” then my lack of understanding does not overly upset me.

I’ve reached an age when taking a nap with an open Bible on my lap appears venerable to onlookers, even though I’m dreaming about bikini girls and a team of ostriches pulling art.

Another exciting feature of our time together is that Ginny and I began reading The Imitation Of Christ by Thomas A’ Kempis. Our readings spark discussions about our focus on worshiping Christ and how unimportant most mundane things are in reality.

Of course, I believe there are no mundane things. All creation declares the glory of the Lord. Worship can be sparked by things as varied as seeing paramedics resuscitate a neighbor with a heart attack, or feeling my frustration over a camera-shy escaping tortoise, or hearing wind whisper through pine needles, or watching a fog bank creep across the lake, or laying quietly with my Bride holding hands and stroking her silver hair, or seeing a monster snapping turtle lurk beneath a bridge, or touching cotton boles in acres of white fields, or listening to workmen talk over lunch in a small town diner, or trying to read a map while traveling over unfamiliar roads, or comforting a young couple of strangers in a roadside grill who out-of-the-blue told us about their relationship dilemma, or even realizing my new-found physical limitations and dependency …

Christ is all in all.

God is all around us. In Him we live and move and have our very being.

The call to worship our Lord is in all things, in all places, at all times.

There is no limit to worship for a loving heart.