Time to buckle up,

Settle down,

Here you are,

Don't look down.

This morning at about I got a call, and before I picked up the ringing phone I knew it would be for me. It was from the recruiting office at Milgard, asking for me to come down to fill out some forms for employment tomorrow morning for the next evening I will be at work. I prayed for a job and now I have one. It is God's will.

I asked many times in the last two months since I returned from my extended post-high school graduation trip to California, "Whatever happens, Lord, it will be your will." It amuses me how my mind works, separating itself from a situation and in turn can make one moment in life seem like the most important thing. I look at the newness which this job brings my way, thinking it is the single event or the only thing in life which matters, and doing that creates a weird feeling in my stomach when I concentrate too much on it. I have found that this feeling is treacherous, false, blindly shallow. It is the simple emotion that is expressed in any event which is outside one's normal bout of life and living life; with this emotion, I dare not travel too far. First day of kindergarten wasn't so bad as I found out a few minutes into it. High school wasn't dream but I managed to learn some things. Earning my driver's license wasn't the elaborate, sophisticated process I had thought it would be. Life brings more than childhood stages, there are difficult ledges to climb on and valor in doing so, and in the graciousness of the Father we are not given a preview of our entire life journey before we're born.

My step dad's father, Al, is in the hospital with many complications, pain, and incoherence. He is 78 and almost completely blind. He has lived with diabetic neuropathy, an eroding of the body's nerves brought on by diabetes; right now he lives his last days on earth closer to the death than some of us, or maybe not. To conquer death not death itself was God's plan. Though we suffer for a while on earth, to suffer in eternity without God is the ultimate sorrow. But Al has been receptive in the example of the gospel, and the last time I had talked with him he seemed as one who has lived through the fire of this world and does not want to walk through the fire of death. Lord, You know Al's heart. Continue to work in his mind, and show him peace in there for the infinite life ahead.

In flesh there's birth,

In flesh there's death,

And then there's life.