"Perspective.............."

It’s eight o‘clock, Friday morning, the weather just outside my front door looking like another go with off-and-on-again drizzly rain. Some sunshine did pop through a bit yesterday afternoon, but nothing so great as to encourage that many others to join me in the nearby park for exercise. This time next week I’ll be over at Veterans undergoing some exploration concerning a recent rise in some sort of number they monitor via yearly blood samples. Other than interfering with my life as it comes to me on a daily basis, the scheduled visit gives me little concern, my thoughts more occupied with the almost serendipitous nature of our existence. That new WWII historical novel I’m reading, among many other inane accounts shared thus far, mentions how our military’s pre-D-Day intelligence reports failed to reveal a ten mile-long piece of Normandy’s landscape that the Germans had flooded to a depth of ten feet, an area covered with reeds and dense marsh grass into which a large number of our troops parachuted only to drown in the darkness. Consider, as well, humanity’s stupidity, a medical battalion coming ashore on Omaha Beach after the blood-bath, bringing with them typewriters and office files, but no surgical equipment or morphine; or, if not already sickened, humanity’s character, one British officer telling his soldiers as they were about to disembark the ship “Do not worry if you don’t survive the assault, as we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you.” The “religious”, of course, point to their faith and speak of “prayer” producing some sort of invincible shield over the believer; and surely there is a bit of truth to that old declaration of there being “no atheists in a foxhole”. Nonetheless, I read of a Nazi V-1 bomb penetrating the reinforced concrete roof of the Guards Chapel in London even as hundreds of people petitioned for His protection with its sanctuary, the explosion killing half of those there, the rest wounded and buried in the rubble; and it seems to me that there has to be an assurance beyond ritualistic repetition, a confidence greater than somebody’s interpretation of chapter and verse. To each, their own; but, for me, that amounts to an initiation confirmed along the way by a few definitive encounters that removed all doubt. From there, though, admittedly it has been a journey, one wherein my stumble is monitored by an inner connection often referred to as an “anchor-line”. Let today begin; tomorrow bring what it may; I am not alone……