[TruthTalk] Back in the saddle...

[ShieldsFamily]

Well, I’m checking in after my too-short trip to Paradise (ie: Palm Springs); sitting here at the computer watching familiar-looking fat, fluffy, flakes falling past the window…oh, well! I read a couple of very funny (Girl-type) books on my trip: cackled out loud all the way to California. Surprised I didn’t get arrested as a threat to security or something. Here are a few quotes from Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott:               As C. S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.”               Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past.               Surrender [to Jesus] means you get to come over to the winning side.               Here are the two best prayers I know, “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”                A woman I know says, for her morning prayer “Whatever,” and for the evening, “Oh, well.”               “…finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.”               My aunt Pat married a Jew, with a large Jewish family in tow, but they were not really into Moses Jews; they were bagelly Jews.”                         I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.               Dylan Thomas said an alcoholic was someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.   I put on my best black swimsuit. It was very expensive when I got it, very alluring. The only fly in the ointment was that it no longer fit. Actually, I’m not positive it ever did, but at least I used to be able to get it on without bruising.   I was not wearing a cover-up, not even a T-shirt. I had decided I was going to take my thighs and butt with me proudly wherever I went. I decided, in fact, on the way to the beach that I would treat them as if they were beloved elderly aunties, the kind who did embarrassing things at the beach, like roll their stockings into tubes around their ankles, but whom I was proud of because they were so great in every real and important way.   So we walked along, the three of us, the aunties and I, to meet our friends in the sand. I imagined that I could feel the aunties beaming, as if they had been held captive in a dark closet too long, like Patty Hearst. Freed finally to stroll on a sandy Mexican beach: what a beautiful story.  It did not bother me that parts of my body—the auntie parts—kept moving even after I had come to a full halt.     See what we have to look forward to with our advancing years?  J         Izzy   PS  Author Anne Lamott is a feminist, liberal Christian.  Seems like an oxymoron to me, but I guess with God anything is possible.