"Schematics....................."

For the last week or so, everywhere I look I see bare-naked ladies. Lest anyone think me delusional or just suddenly taken up with a walk on the wild side, though, the objects of which I speak are but a flower grown in these parts, a long leaf-less stem that shoots up about this time of year, getting maybe two or three feet tall before erupting into a pale pink blossom.

For most of their existence, they are merely an underground bulb and their short life span, over a decade ago, gave this old man the opinion that they were simply a nuisance, infesting my yard in such numbers. I must have dug up and discarded close to a hundred of them before Beth discovered my ignorance in such matters. She was not at all pleased… Rash reasoning has gotten me into trouble on many other occasions. As a young teenager transplanted from the inner city, it once seemed silly to me tearing my pants continually on a barbwire fence blocking my path out in the middle of nowhere. Never had I ever seen any livestock in the vicinity; and the next time I took such route to a buddy’s house over on another road a pair it was a simply matter to snip an opening through it. With his cattle shortly thereafter in need of a round-up, my future father-in-law was not at all impressed by my thinking… The Spiritual anchor-line received between the two incidents presented here, then, is obviously not a cure-all for the human condition. Mostly, even in Christ, we operate out of our individual decisions, our mentality as it has come to us in the journey thus far, His tug on that inner connection not necessarily a demand for obedience. We learn as we go, usually in a hard-knocks experience coupled with divine counsel after the facts as they are. Thank God for grace……