Dear Reader:

If you think the picture (above) looks like it is leaning, you are right.  I didn’t check it until I got home. I had my index finger poised to hit “fix” and then “straighten” on the computer but stopped myself just in the nick of time. After all…the title is about ‘propping me up in my leaning places”…. so the picture is perfect just the way it is…leaning.(I am purposely leaning down on the cane.)

Of course, when the workers on Archibald Rutledge’s plantation, Hampton, made this remark…they were praying to God to help them leave their weaknesses behind that kept them leaning through life and instead follow God in the “straight path of righteousness.”

After I retired one day, the door bell rang and it was one of the funniest personalities at Dorchester Two School District standing there…Billy Riley. He heard I had retired and he must “annoint” me into my new retirement family with his latest “crooked” cane he had made me.

I remember thanking him and telling him that the “crooked” cane reminded me of the old Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

“There was a Crooked Man”

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

The last few weeks I have felt that I probably could use a crooked cane to help my hip. I turned or pulled  a muscle… or did something to put a cramp in my right hip which is painful  still at times….though vastly improved over a couple of weeks ago.

I find myself “leaning” on my left leg more in case my hip feels dis-jointed without notice. I keep telling myself it could be worse, it could be “sciatica.“

(I don’t even like to whisper that word. I suffered with this extremely painful condition for about one year following my last surgery. It was worse than any cancer treatment came close to being. My compassion and empathy for anyone suffering from nerve damage or acute painful nerve endings is filled to capacity….it is a terrible, constant pain.)

In my case, though, I lucked up… the next January, almost to the day of the surgery, I woke up and it was gone. It disappeared as suddenly as it came.

The memories, however, still linger and any time I feel a sharp pain in my lower back and /or leg down to my toes… I start praying like Brer Rabbit….”Give me anything Lord, just please don’t throw me back in that briar patch of pain.”

One day Archibald Rutledge was talking to one of his workers about a big project he wanted the two of them to start. He noticed the worker kept fidgeting and finally the worker said, “Boss…hate to interrupt but I have to get to church….I’m late.” But he didn’t say it that way….instead the worker used this eloquent phrase I hope I remember for a long time.

“Now I must go light my candle at His fire.” (Don’t you love that expression?)

In this last Archibald Rutledge story…he remembers sitting beside a family member as she lay dying (I believe this was the death of his first wife) and later wrote about the message that formed his thoughts around this poignant experience.

“The Spirituality of Sunrise”

One dearer to me than all else in life had, for days, lain helpless, speechless. Consciousness was gone. We knew that the mortal mists were fast gathering; that the irremediable river must soon be crossed.

The last morning of our watching was misty; the day emerged so wanly that we hardly knew that it had come. Suddenly the one we loved so dearly sat up in bed, a strange light on her face of a happiness past all our mortal joy. She stretched abroad her arms, crying in the radiant abandon of spiritual certainty, “The dawn! The beautiful Dawn!” Those were her dying words-glad, triumphant.

And for me they hold the eternal promise of a sunrise. They glow with immortality. In every sense, our mortal dawn that day was anything but beautiful; but she saw the beginning of an immortal day.

Believing in a God of infinite love and of infinite power, I find it natural to believe that death is not a disastrous sundown but rather a spiritual sunrise, ushering in the un-conjectured splendors of immortality. . . . Sunrise suggests to me not only the power of God grandly to continue what He has begun but it also conveys the reassurance of the Creator’s love returning to us daily, bringing joy and forgiveness; and to any reflective heart it intimates that no night is final; for, since with God all things are possible, His almighty love has, I confidently believe, prepared for us a radiant future beyond the sundown of death.

…And if I meditate but momentarily upon what He has done and upon what He does do, confidence in immortality is natural, reasonable, and, to my way of believing, to be counted upon as infallible as the sunrise.

So until tomorrow…Thank you Father for giving us the sunrise and sunset as a constant in an every-changing world….It is Your promise that no matter what else changes in our lives….You are there. for us.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

• John sent this adorable picture of Eva Cate…her second tooth came out yesterday…she is starting to keep the tooth fairy flying faster….so glad they are falling out just in time for first day of school pictures and class pictures…what is more adorable than a classroom of snaggly toothed first graders? Be hard pressed to find one
• Teacher grandmothers start that reading ritual early….they know how important it is….but it is also important to take baby out in nature for a little loving! Brookie and Caleb…Boogie Boy!
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• *Yesterday, besides being the sixth anniversary of the blog….it was Honey and Mike’s 41st anniversary. Congratulations you, too…a couple of fabulous one’s who make a terrific two-some! Tarshie put this collage on FACEBOOK yesterday and want to put it on here in case you missed it!