Vacation day 2 plus a monday "message"

Yesterday was a light day on the vacation train.  The day started out as Sundays do... let me walk you through it.


Scrappy wakes up while it's still dark, and he's ready to get a drink and go to the bathroom- a state which, adding taking my meds, I share with him.  Aftrewards, I go to a few selected sites to listen/sing along in spirit to a selection of hymns.  Which gets me in the proper spirit to listen to a sermon from Dennis Miller.  I would say, "current sermon", but actually I am running a couple weeks behind him.  Now you might ask, why do you not just go to church?    That is really between my God and myself, but it is a lot about my earlier experience of a) not being humble/humbled, and b) making a hash of things in my own pride.  Moving on...


This morning in particular was a message from the 1 Corinthians message to the singles in their church.  My first thought was, this was a lesson I needed 45 years ago- though I wonder if I would have listened.  There are a myriad of such lessons that have come to me in the last ten years: lessons about my "need" for control and how stupid that was; my innate self-righteousness and the need to be 'right', which I learned from my father; the attitudes that keep me from grace; and how much different my life would have been/could be if I were more give-related than take-related.  Now at 56, I am not only fighting all these, but their time-ingrained nature.

When I was at that impressionable age, my church gave me rock-solid faith in the EXISTANCE of God, the FACT of Jesus's atoning death, but...  we went to a lot of Saturday night masses, in a church without AC or really good heat, so there was a handful of good-weather weeks that we got a half-listened to sermon, and a LOT of too-hot/too cold weeks where the Priest skipped a sermon just to move things on, because it was the ritual of faith, not its growth, that was "important".  Not to mention 8 years of weekday morning services without a sermon, and the only time we had a priest set foot inside the school to instruct us was a brief period under one particular priest whom our parents thought was a whackjob and soon ran out of the parish.  Anything I had to learn about God beyond simple faith was at His feet alone, with the help of a handful of believing friends.

ANYway, now that you know a little of the why, let me move on.  The next step of Sunday is taking Scrappy to the bark park, praying morning prayers along the way...

"So, who's been here..."

Little dog is friendly, big dog was STILL barking...

The boys at the "bar"

"I think it's time to go to the mailbox and back..."

This guy was having a dove-fight with another and dive-bombed us a couple of times before he decided to pose...

It was dew-y in the extreme...

...which makes the freckles on his nose pop!

Here you can see why I say we live in "the bowl"...

Later came an evening solo walk...

Moonlight over the swamp

Mrs Goldfinch.  

Just in case you like "Moonlight over the river" better

So the remains of old California Road swoop south towards Coliseum Blvd, ending just across from a break in the fence row that separates the river from the field across from Coliseum Parking.  There, I came around the corner to this...





And THAT is a real Sunday blessing... as God takes care of these, He'll take care of you.  Monday is "4 new tires" day, so IDK if I'll have a lot to report...