Cloud shadows and wool gathering...

A young friend called and asked if she could do an interview about my experience with Viet Nam. Two of her classes are studying that part of our country’s history and an interview was one of the requirements along with reading a book, The Things They Left Behind. We sat on the front porch. She pulled out her little recorder and her list of questions. We spent some holy time together, two citizens of different worlds that overlap in affection and connection. I have known her since she was a small child and now she is in high school, a junior. Life stretches out before her as an uncharted yet to be mapped travelogue. The realities of her life are foreign territory for me as is my life for her.
I did my best to remember a time when there were no cell phones or PC’s for communication, when letters and tape recordings were sent everyday to the one I loved on the other side of the world. It was a time when the tumult in the outside world, the civil rights struggles, assassinations, uncivil political conventions, Viet Nam war up close and personal on your black and white t.v. news every night, bombings and burnings and bombast everywhere, was both impossible to ignore and impossible to completely understand.
Remembering and talking about those times in my life long ago sent me on a journey, a wool gathering trip as I considered my life then, during the in-between and now. All week I have been day tripping through my life... looking through the scrapbook of my life and remembering the different places I have been. It has been a wild ride at times but I am grateful for it all.
When mama and I were out on Wednesday, we topped a hill and saw a panoramic view of the mountains dappled with sun and cloud shadows. The shadows moved as the clouds floated through the sky and as they moved on, the sunlight reappeared. In an instant, my eyes filled with tears. My life stories, like your life stories, are the mountains dappled with shadows and light. The shadows are not permanently fixed but the light is always present. In that moment I was excruciatingly aware of the presence of God all through my life, my traveling companion in shadow lands and light parades.
Saint Augustine said, “And he departed from our sight, that we might return to our heart, and there find him. For he departed and behold, he is here.” Thus it has been in my life. Jesus departed, gone from my sight but ever present in my heart. As I continue traveling through this life of mine, I give thanks for all those who have been on the road trip with me. And I am so grateful for life with all its complexities and joys and problems and sorrows... light that is never extinguished and shadows that define and teach. Thanks be to God.