John Cowart's Daily Journal: A befuddled ordinary Christian looks for spiritual realities in day to day living.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
I Question God
I have something important to say but I don’t know how to say it.
I’ve made a couple of starts on this post but deleted every one.
That’s because I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I need to think this through more.
I’ll try next week.
The question I’m worrying is why awful tragedies befall people, good people, bad people, indifferent people, guilty, innocent babies… If God is love, why do hateful things happen?
I don’t have an answer. Not one that satisfies me.
Only some isolated thoughts, and they seem ineffectual clichés .
Let me get back to you on this.
Meanwhile, Saturday morning Ginny and I enjoyed a lovely time in our garden. While working on the Google Books and William Short’s Diary, I neglected our yard shamefully. It was good to get out there again.
While Ginny re-potted flowers, I edged and mowed. Then we spent the rest of our workday sitting under the awning, sipping coffee, smoking and talking about other work we could do—ifwe were a-mind to.
Without moving from our chairs we watched a hummingbird, a woodpecker, scores of dove, cardinals, bluejays, titmice, chickadees, a thrush, a pair or wren, and a bunch of LGBs—that means little gray birds, meaning we don’t know what they are.
Friday, for the first time in ages, I checked my website statistics. Google Analytics tells me that in the past month 3,417 readers from 88 countries visited my site. My writing so fascinated these readers that they each spent an average of 39 seconds on my site.
Wow! Isn’t that cool!
As I passed my cursor over the Analytics world map, I wondered why anyone from this nation or that one would visit my site—then it occurred to me that they may be checking me out because of my site name, The Rabid Fundamentalist at www.cowart.info.
Funny why I chose to name my site that:
Back when I was young, for about ten years I worked part-time at a local newspaper as an Editorial Assistant—that’s the job title for a mail clerk who can be blamed for a lot of things that go wrong at a newspaper. Like the time I authorized renting a helicopter without asking a boss first.
Because of my night and weekend hours, about 80 per cent of the time I was the only person in the building while I worked.
When the team of editors became aware that I am a Christian, they began to tease me and called me “that rabid fundamentalist, Cowart”. The nickname stuck. I thought it was funny and when I passed along copy or notes, I signed as Rabid Fundamentalist. That’s how I was logged onto the computer.
This column outraged some local clergy. I never saw them myself, but I understand that a delegation of eight angry clergymen visited the managing editor to protest.
The Rabid Fundamentalistcolumn was yanked that same afternoon.
Through this circumstance I did not loose my job as mail clerk, but it seems that through this incident God called me to write obituaries for my next few years at the paper.
This pained me, but I suppose the Lord knows what He’s doing.
I think the Lord God is more interested in my walk with Him and in developing my character than He is in what I happen to be doing to earn a living.
As Saint Paul said, “Whatsoever ye do inwordordeed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him”.
When Ginny and I go to the library, which we do almost weekly, I gravitate to the horror, action/adventure, or mystery shelves. I seek favorite authors and familiar types of literature; Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Sally Spencer, and Connie Willis hook me. Books with black spines with red lettering attract my attention.
To avoid a one-track mind, in addition to “my books”, each week I try to check out a book in a subject area far afield, some book to do with a subject I have little interest in.
Yes, an intellectual diet of blood, guts, gore, and mystery, fun as these elements are, stagnate the mind.
In the space of five years, Captain Hudson voyaged to the Artic five times in three different wooden sailing ships; Hopewell, Half Moon, and Discovery.
Backed by merchants in London, and once in Holland, he sought to find a Northwest Passage, a quick route to the spice lands of the Orient. Spices could preserve food in those days without refrigeration. Spices acted as medicine and were widely regarded as the Viagra of the times. Spices made men wealthy. Contenders for the spice trade fought wars. If England could find a way to the Orient without having to sail around Africa or South America, King James would rule the world..
Yes, Henry Hudson’s last voyage was in 1611, the same year the King James Bible was first translated and published.
“Fierce winds racing up to 30 miles per hour across the water made the average temperature …30 to 40 degrees below zero,” Mancall wrote.
Hudson discovered New York’s Hudson River, giving the Dutch, claim to the place, and Hudson’s Straight, and Hudson Bay—but he could find no way through the ice to the lands of spice.
Two of Hudson’s crew, Abacuk Pricket and Robert Juet, kept brief written accounts; much of Hudson’s story comes from their records.
On Hudson’s final voyage, when food began to run short, crew members rebelled.
Mutiny.
Ringleaders forced Captain Hudson, his son, and all the sick men aboard the Discovery into an open boat called a shallop. To keep control, the mutineers told their captives it was only temporary while the crew looted food stores—They lied.
They cut the rope letting the shallop full of sick men drift off into the ice never to be seen again.
This happened in the southern reaches of Hudson Bay at a place named James Bay. Mancall reasons that the marooned sailors in the shallop may have made landfall and tried to winter there.
As to the mutineers, as they tried to find food ashore, Eskimos attacked them harpooning several. Survivors, who claimed to just be along for the ride, swore that all the insurgents had been killed. They would. They were tried for murder once they returned to England. Of the original 23 men who sailed from London, only eight returned.
What happened to Hudson and the loyal men adrift?
No one really knows.
But Mr. Mancall speculates:
They probably died one after another, succumbing to a brutal chill that never ceased to freeze their bodies. Or scurvy could have killed them if they had failed to lay in enough cockle grass to ward it off. If they fell victim to the disease, their gums would have bled, their teeth might eventually have fallen out, and any bones broken earlier could have fractured again; the men would have become dehydrated from diarrhea, sunk into depression, and eventually expired. Some might have suffered frostbite, leading to gangrene and death. If they chose to burn sea coal, which could have washed up on the shore and was a common source of heat in this era when wood was not available, they might have died of carbon monoxide poisoning, a fate that possibly befell an earlier shipload of English men sailing in search of the Northeast Passage in 1553. Animal attacks, especially by polar bears or wolves, could also have taken them.
At first, the ill or injured could have been tended by those who remained healthy. But eventually, the men still able to nurse others also would have grown so weak that they could do no more than haul the corpses of their companions into the snow. If they lacked the strength to bury the dead, they could have put off the task until the next summer's thaw. One can imagine the bodies dragged out of the hut, their clothes increasingly shredded by wind. Eventually, scavenging bears, wolves, and foxes would have gnawed off the frozen flesh, ultimately obliterating any sign of the men's existence.
Yes, it is good for me to read non-fiction, to read history, to read something instead of my standard horror fare. Keeps me cool and keeps me from getting morbid.
P.S.:
Yesterday I maligned Google Books in my rant.
I apologize.
Although I had to learn how to do a spreadsheet this morning, uploading those 22 books proved much easier than I expected.The botheration came in preparing my own files to meet Google Books’ strict prerequisites.
Once I uploaded my files, the Google Books site tells me that it may take their experts several weeks before my books actually show up in the Google Book Program.
There’s a reason for that.
I think it’s because the gurus at Google Books are much smarter than I am—they don’t use computers to process this stuff.
I, John Cowart, by the Grace of God, King of Geriatric Geeks, do hereby issue the following proclamation concerning computers in general and Google Books in particular:
%&(*##!!!
Well, other Royals hardly ever use that kind of language—except maybe the first Queen Elizabeth when she saw the sails of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel.
Yes, yesterday I braved the intricacies of Google Books’ perimeters trying to format about 20 books I’ve written or edited for inclusion. I flat gave up on the ones in other languages. The folks in Germany, Indonesia and the Philippines, if they want my books listed on Google Book Search, will just have to register the texts themselves.
But, with my books in English,all I had to do was reformat the Word documents, scan in new photos of the book covers, rename scads of files, create pdf documents, resize and transfer stuff to new, renamed (in 13 or so digits without spaces) folders.
Challenging work considering my level of computer skills.
I know how to cut.
I know how to paste.
I know that if you click on a thumbnail photo of a bikini girl, her attributes grow large enough to fill the screen.
Nevertheless, armed with this knowledge, a prayer, and a blissful, confident attitude, I undertook to prepare my books for wider distribution via the Google Books simple 82-step process.
Worked fine till I got to book # 17. I prepared that file in exactly the same way I’d done the previous 16 files, but an error message appeared. It said, “Failed For An Unknown Reason”. Then a little box appeared which said I could click “OK”.
Nothing else. Just OK.
Why OK? What unknown reason? If the computer could not figure out what went wrong with that file, how am I supposed to?
A Scripture came to mind—from St Paul’s first letter to the people of Corinth, Chapter 14, where he said:
“God is not the author of confusion, but of peace,… But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant….Let all things be done decently and in order”.
That’s one Scripture I can obey—the part about staying ignorant.
I’m good at that.
If God is not the author of confusion, then just who do you think it was that set up the Google Books system?
Answer me that.
But, I press ahead.
I think I can solve the problem. Piece of cake.
Like that high-tech bakery that utilizes a computer/ cum laser/ cum inkjet thingy to decorate and letter their cakes with precision…
Precision that is if you type in the right Hyper Tense Markup Language.
If I don’t, my books may come out looking like Aunt Elsa’s Birthday Cake:
Meanwhile, I join with that other king, the one who wrote the Psalms, in praying, “In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion”.
In my diary entry yesterday (posted about 4 a.m.) I said I’m planning to write a book about following God’s will and my working title is If God Leads Me, Why Do I Run In Circles?.
Then, I spent all day yesterday practicing for that book—not the God leading section, but the running in circles part.
I drove Ginny to work so I could keep the car. I made her late so she had to dash into the building but one of her co-workers sat outside in the smoking area with me and we talked about her dogs and about good places to go camping.
By then it was time for me to go to the Jacksonville Fire Museum. For the past 35 years I’ve accumulated a bunch of books, artifacts, and stuff related to Florida history focusing on Jacksonville, and I’m talking with the curator about selling my collection to the museum. We’ll see what happens.
Leaving the museum, I drove to an antique store only to find the item I’d seen there two weeks ago had already sold to somebody else.
Waterhaul!
(That’s a local curse word, an old shrimper’s term for when you cast your net but it brings in nothing but water).
Then I stopped to visit a cancer patient. There was no chair by his bed so I stood while he talked my ear off. Beginning with vicious racial remarks then moving on to rant about taxes, insurance companies, city government, and Social Security, he raddled on and on. My feet ached so bad, burning and stinging from standing so long. I had other business I needed to attend to—but the old guy talked in a panic as though I were the last audience in the world…
Then the thought occurred to me, I just may be his last audience in this world. It behooves me to stand here and listen.
Do you suppose God’s feet hurt while He’s hearing me ramble on and on about the same old things He’s heard me say a million times before? Remember, He does have nail scars.
Breaking away, I drove to the bank to pay our mortgage. And speaking of feet… A num was in the bank ahead of me. I mean the old fashioned kind of nun with white bib, a wimple (is that what you call the huge fancy head-gear with wings?) and long black skirts…
And peaking out from under the edge of her floor-sweeping skirt, I saw she was wearing electric, day-glow, blue flip-flops!
Immediately I thought of that Scripture, “Howbeautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!”
I doubt that either Isaiah or Paul had blue flip-flops in mind when they penned those words, but that’s the Scripture I though of.
From the bank, I drove home to pick up some papers I’d forgotten before leaving this morning. Then to Dave’s Diner for a late breakfast, then to Wal—Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here—Mart Super Center. Where I walked miles to the aisle where they always keep the product I came for. And as I walked, I impulse bought a basketful of other stuff that struck my fancy. And I got the aisle to find the stuff I wanted had been moved—to make way for Christmas toys! (I mean it is still August, isn’t it?) So a helpful employee directed me back the way I’d come, but the stuff was not there either.. So another helpful employee ping-ponged me back thataway. And I finally found the aisle I wanted—only to find they no longer stock the stuff.
I said a bad word.
It wasn’t waterhaul.
I was a bad boy. I left my full shopping cart sitting right there in the middle of the aisle and I walked out of the store without buying anything. I’d spent over an hour, but not one penny, in that store.
Waterhaul!
Then I drove to a pool supply store where the young man thought I looked too old, decrepit and feeble to carry a bucket of chlorine tablets out to my own car.
He was right, but he didn’t have to let me know it!
Young whippersnapper!
Then I drove to a plant nursery to buy Ginny a flowering Crown-Of-Thorns cactus—but they tell me it’s not a cactus. It may not be a cactus, but I’ll bet it cost a whole lot more than the original Crown of Thorns it was named after.
Then I drove home to unload things.
Checking my e-mail, I found a note from a lady named Betty about a story I wrote back in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Betty said, “I remember this story, almost word for word, from maybe 20-25 years ago … It had a huge impact on how I lived my life and I've recalled it as a favorite modern-day parable many times in different conversations…over the years”.
I feel that so much of what I write disappears without a ripple. So Betty’s note certainly gave me a lift.
Anyhow, by then it was time to pick Ginny up from work, so I drove downtown. Then we drove to the Main Library. Then we drove to a restaurant for supper where Ginny ran into a friend of hers whose husband, Billy, suffered a bad fall and is undergoing surgery today.
Finally we drove back home—full circle to where the day started.
Thus I ran in circles all day.
Did God lead me?
Does He lead us in mundane run-around-chores?
Is He Lord of the Ordinary?
Does the Almighty God, Creator of the Universe, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Savior of the World, Risen Lord of Life—does He preside over times when the highpoint of the day is seeing a nun wearing blue flip-flops?
Yes, I’m moving ahead again. After a lull. After I finished editing and publishing William F. short’s 1854 Diary, I experienced a backlash, a letdown, which put me in a stupor—that is, more of a stupor than usual.
This always happens at the end of a difficult project. I go to afterburners to complete the task, and I fool myself into thinking I can maintain that pace permanently, then like a calf roped by a cowboy, or like a thief on the scaffold, I hit the end of my rope, and swing in the breeze, not going anywhere.
Short once said in a diary entry: “Today I thought much; did little”.
I can go him one better, “Today I thought little; did less”.
That describes many of my recent days.
After a lull, during which I kick myself for being a lazy, useless, sorry, no-account, I slowly recover and begin to function again on a low level until the mania for writing builds up steam and I start the process all over again.
And here’s the thing: during all this I’m a Christian seeking the will of God for my life from where I stand at the moment. Yet, I am victim to the cyclic effect of my own work habits and psyche. I know this letdown happens, but I fall for it every time. Some folks never learn.
So, at the moment, I’m moving in three similar directions:
First, off and on I continue to transcribe Barbara White’s prayer diaries—a long term task which is essentially clerical.
Second, my e-friend Sherri, who is knowledgeable about marketing, recently stimulated my thinking about promoting my books. Although I resist self-promotion, she pointed out the value of certain steps I can take—and she made a lot of sense. So, last week, when a newspaper reporter called, I agreed to an interview and was quoted in last Saturday’s paper.
See, Sherri, I do listen.
In the same vein as Sherri suggested, I’m investigating uploading 20 or so books into Google Books—a daunting task. I asked my son Donald, a computer whiz, to help me with this, but he’s deeply involved with more important projects.
Not only is Donald working full time as a computer network manager, being active in his church, supporting his family, and getting his daughter into college, but in a couple of weeks he enrolls in seminary to study becoming a Christian minister.
Full plate!
I’m proud of him.
But, his busyness means I’m on my own navigating the intricate shoals and rocks and PDFs andJava ™ Platform SE Binary and Co-Branded Search and APIs and spreadsheets and territorial rights and 10 or 13 character ISBNs with leading zeros and HTMLs (whatever they are) of Google’s complex process… Oh well, if God wants it done, I’ll get it done; if not, it’s all Donald’s fault.
Third, I’ve decided on which book idea to pursue next.
Years ago, I defaulted on a book contract to write a book about knowing the will of God. The working title of my book was to be If God Leads Me, Why Do I Run In Circles?
I took the publisher’s advance money and pocketed it. Then things came up. Disturbing things which made me realize that I know virtually nothing about the Lord or His will. I made many false starts and wasted hundreds of pages of text trying to write this book.
I just couldn’t.
The publisher exercised great patience again and again, moved deadlines several times, then gave up on me, and forgave my debt.
Yet, this book idea haunted me off and on for all these years.
After finishing the Short Diary, I made a list of some book ideas I want to do. Six of eight topped my list as I sought God’s will about what I’m to work on next. That defaulted book kept rising to the surface as I weighted pros and cons about my list.
While I pondered what to do, I did common everyday chores, mowed grass, cleaned the fish tank, read library books, washed dishes, watching the Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed video …. As I did these mundane things, a slow conviction grew that now is the time for me to finish writing If God Leads…
I know less about finding the will of God for my life than I did when I was cocksure and younger. In fact my faith wobbles like a kid’s spinning top running down. I feel less confidence than ever before in my life. Yet, I suspect If God Leads should be what I should write next.
Yes, I used to be indecisive. But now I’m not sure about that.
It’s safe to say that Ginny and I have been married for 40+ years. We honeymooned in the oldest continuously occupied city in the U.S., St. Augustine, Florida, about 35 miles south of Jacksonville. Although it will not be our anniversary for a couple of months yet, we spent last Sunday driving to St. Augustine to revisit some of the places we remember from our honeymoon.
Great fun!
We arrived in the Old City in time for breakfast at a restaurant overlooking Matanzas Bay. Here’s a photo of Ginny at our table; she looks so beautiful, fresh and happy:
After breakfast we sneaked out for a smoke into a walled private garden courtyard behind the place where Ginny posed by a misplaced lamppost where once a street may have crossed the property. While there, a young man came out for a smoke break and revealed that he’s been married for only a year. He’s already feeling some tensions of married life and was amazed that we remain romantically in love after 41 years. I told him one secret is to simply learn to tolerate each other when that’s the best you can do.
Gin and I along with scores of other tourists strolled the length of St George Street and paused to rest at the old slave market. There some lady snapped a photo of us together as we discussed the question of exactly how long we’ve been married.
We strolled browsing amid shops and paused for ice cream and coffee near the old city gates and I took this photo of her with the old fort in the background:
We toured the Lightener Museum, an exquisite collection of Victorian stuff and other stuff that took the fancy of Otto C. Lightner, a wealthy collector who housed his collections in the lavish mansion of the old Alcazar Hotel.
We saw a number of exquisite inlaid—well, I call them writing desks, but there’s a fancy term for them—that had belonged to Napoleon. One of these desks has over 200 secret compartments and pigeon holes.
And we saw a gold gilt, two-person, swan rocking chair, the kind that temps you to cuddle:
I enjoyed seeing the stuffed lion, the shrunken head, the Egyptian mummy and the bronze or marble statues of naked women.
Ginny enjoyed browsing through collections of old buttons (like from dresses and shirts), crystal bowls. She enjoyed the polished ballroom and the spiral staircases of the old hotel. And she admired a tiffany lamp with a glass shade formed in a dragon fly pattern:
One room intrigued us both. Mr. Lightner collected stained glass windows. Many of these were created by Louis Comfort Tiffany; they are displayed back-lighted in a dark room. Ginny posed beside windows portraying two other beauties:
She photographed me beside this Tiffany window showing St. Augustine, the man, not the city, the names are pronounced differently although I think the city was named for the man—who is shown reading. I’m sure it must be one of my books he’s reading:
Downstairs, a museum staff member played some of the antique music machine which long predate the phonograph. One of the tunes one machine played was “When You And I Were Young, Maggie”.
In the museum gift shop I asked the museum lady what Otto Lightner did for a living that he could afford to buy such a collection of treasures. She said he was a publisher!
That broke me up. I’m a publisher and it was all I could do to afford to buy our admission tickets to the museum!
I suppose there are publishers, and then again there are Publishers.
However, be that as it may, I splurged and bought Ginny an umbrella which replicates Tiffany’s Dragonfly lampshade:
Hot, tired and hungry by now, we walked to the bay front where US Highway A1A crosses the Bridge Of Lions. We stopped for lunch at the A1A Aleworks and Cuban Restaurant; The last time we were in this restaurant, it had been a French bakery.
When we mentioned that to the young lady who served us, a girl I imagine to be in her mid-20s, she was amazed that we’ve been married so long. She misheard us and thought we said we’ve been married for 44 years. To celebrate, our of her own pocket, she bought me a beer called Red Brick Ale. The place brews their own beer and I told her this Red Brick Ale was the best I’ve ever tasted.
So she brought me several small glasses of other beers to sample. Now the last beer I tasted was during half-time of the 2007 Super Bowl so I accused her of trying to get me snockered. The samples included the girl’s own favorite, Porpoise Point, some Honey Mead, and a beer brewed from bananas—ghastly stuff! But the Red Brick Ale tasted heavenly.
And our food also tasted heavenly. I had coconut shrimp with a black bean and rice dish cooked with a touch of jalapeno pepper. One of the best meals I’ve ever eaten anywhere.
And the girl kept marveling that we’ve been in love for 44 years.
After lunch, we crossed the street into the Slave Market park. There Ginny snapped this photo of the building which now houses the Wachovia Bank.
That’s cool because many years ago in a dump I found a piggy-bank shaped like this building, but then the name was the Exchange Bank Of St. Augustine, an institution which lasted till the mid 1950s. I gave that white-metal coin bank to Ginny as a reminder of our honeymoon.
Ginny’s coin bank looks like this:
The shape of that tower reminds us of something related to our honeymoon.
Ah yes I remember now, from our motel room window 40+ years ago, we could see that towersilhouetted against the skyline across the bay; for some reason they were setting off fireworks from the top of the building. St. Augustine is always celebrating some event or another with fireworks.
Here’s thatphoto a passerby took of Ginny and me sitting in the Slave Market park.
As we sat in the park watching people walk past and remembering the days of our honeymoon, we chuckled over the girl in the restaurant thinkingwe’ve been married 44 years—we’re not that old!
As we talked there was some disagreement on the matter. I said we’ve been married 41 years; Ginny says we’ve been married 42 years.
I said it’s only been 41 years—but it they’ve been so hard on her that it seems like 42 years.
She said it’s been 42 years—but that I earned a year off for good behavior.
I'm a Christian of sorts and I get a kick out of writing a religious humor website called The Rabid Fundamentalist at www.cowart.info. I hope you enjoy reading my work. -- John.
