Launch out into the deep

Gentle reader, 


An experienced blogger I met a few days ago in cyberspace gave me instructions for setting this up. He said his kids could do it in 10 minutes. I followed the instructions (it took me 20) and wrote back proudly, "I'm a blogger!" To which he replied, "You're not a blogger till you do your first post. May I suggest a long rambling post about what you plan to do with the blog filled with rash promises that you'll never fulfill - that's where most of us start!"

This is like New Year's or stepping out onto newly-fallen snow--except, of course, I reassure myself with relief, I can delete! 

Rash promises. Okay, here we go. I promise, or at least I hope, not to be so personal and trivial that this gets boring. I'd like to have several categories. One could be nostalgic glimpses across the past half-century at a little girl, the homely, shy, bright, observant, imaginative, fun little girl I was then. "Pixie from Ohio," The N(ew) Z(ealand) Woman's Weekly called me two years after our family (4/5ths of us anyway) launched out on our voyage around the world in the Phoenix of Hiroshima, a yacht Dad designed during his 3 years studying the effects of the first atomic bomb on Japanese children for the Atomioc Energy Commission. 

I could describe how permanently those four years branded my outlook and personality. How grateful I was then and still am, to grow up in a family that read widely, discussed ideas and could enjoy being silly. How grateful, too, that my father's vision of sailing around the world caught me up in a magnificent adventure I would never have known, left to my shy, security-seeking self.

I'd like to share how later, as a teen, I sought ultimate truth in human knowledge, read the great philosophers, dabbled in the major religions, assuming the greater the intelligence, the greater the handle on truth. Only to be bitterly disillusioned. Men's best logic could not agree even on whether there is a god. Or a pantheon of gods. Or whether we are Him (or Them).(Or It.)

Of course I knew what we are each programmed to know, what the apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 1 we all have "evident within" us, that a higher being exists and is powerful. On the high seas, watching sunsets and experiencing tsunamis that forced our masts and sails flat against the water, I could not help but acknowledge an ultimate power, maybe even an ultimate mind. But it was a power I couldn't figure out how to access or connect with. 

It wasn't until I was 19 that I came to understand, all at once, through something called The Four Spiritual Laws, not only that God can be known and, even better, wants to be known but that He (not, after all, It) is the only one who can initiate that process. And in that moment I said, "If You're real, You'll have to initiate it in me, because I don't want to deceive myself." And, with an unheard whisper of Peace, be still, He did. The storm and raging seas within me were calm and I sensed no transition from one state to the other. They just were.

Well, now I have dealt with that one. One promise fulfilled, at least as an abstract!

I'd like to offer theories from a Biblical perspective concerning various subjects. For instance, I'd like to post five articles I wrote in November 2008, Preparing for Persecution. I'd like to peek behind the disasters in the world at what they are assuring us, that, by golly, Jesus Christ really is coming again. Jesus said when these things start happening, we should look up and start watching for him. It's on a calendar to which we are not privy. But it's really going to happen! Who knew! (Well, I guess He did.)

If we didn't know that, these things--wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, epidemics --would be terrifying. Not that we stop praying for and giving money to help those affected by them. But when we read in our newspapers that huge Antarctic glaciers are calving and falling into the sea, we can turn to Psalm 46 and read, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. . ."

That very power which is one of His invisible attributes (Paul's Letter to the Romans again) can be our refuge and our source of comfort during it all. (I need to remember that next time "the earth is removed" here in Southern California and I instinctively bolt for the doorway as I learned to do growing up in Japan.) Fear can be real raw terror, not just reverential awe, but it's all the same God. My Creator is also my good Daddy and He will take care of me.  Us.

So now I can check that one off!

I have more in mind, simmering. I'd like to write a defense of semi-colons. I'd like to defend the use of "that" in sentences which don't make sense without one. I'd like to introduce interesting people, like William Archibald Spooner and Will Rogers and my mother. Besides being a saint and my best friend, Mum was fun. A Japanese friend described her as "a very scattered mind. . . very hard to pin." I'd like you to know her, too.

Is this long and rambling enough, Matt Blick?