the other walk

Well yes, but…

by taohobo

With Passover and Easter fast approaching and Ramadan in June it’s a good time to reflect on how we live our lives.

Don’t Just Believe In God, Believe Him is the title of a blog on The TJ Blog, by – wait for it – TJ. I know, you already guessed that. But take the time to get to know TJ. I know that you can only get to know as much about a person from their blog as they’re willing to share, but TJ does a pretty good job of that. But, he’s young, only a little younger than me, but that’s because he’s more mature than his years and I tend sometimes to be (someone I love would say immature) a little less mature than my years. Which doesn’t diminish what he has to say.

But, that’s not what this post is about. It’s about what TJ had to say on the subject of God, about believing Him. That’s spot on. Believing in God, is very different than believing God, and TJ clearly sees, from experience,  that that simple difference has profound potential if you take the next logical step of trusting God. But, do you trust Him enough? There are amazing things to learn when you’re willing to trust Him enough to step off the path. The path that seems to be the main highway of life these days – the “my way or the highway”, “they’re different, they’re wrong”, “us or them” path.

But, then there’s Pope Francis. How’d he get into this discussion? Simple, he’s stepped off the path and taken the next logical step after TJ’s blog entry. Francis believes in God, he believes Him, and he’s obeying Him. If you’ve missed that, step back and look at what he is doing and saying because it’s all tied to two verses in scripture. TJ cited the first one, John 3:16, and Francis is living the second one, John 13:34 (Actually everything God wants for and from us is summed up in three verses: Mark 12:29-31, in the Qur’an 98:5 and 103:3 or if you’re neither Muslim or Christian, the Golden Rule). I hope you read and think about those references before you finish reading this post.

TJ lived it during his mission years in West Africa, read about it in his blog. TJ closes the blog entry that started this ramble with “Trust Him. Let Him take care of you. It might be scary at first, but He won’t let you down. He loves you.” But, now it’s time to love others!

What’s this guy doing here?

by taohobo

That’s basically the same question I asked myself when at 20 I found myself in the Pacific, swimming as fast as I  could, as the Gridley drifted toward the far horizon.

Maybe that story says something about why I write, why I blog, who I am.

I had grown up in a Navy family, traveling here and there. Picking the wrong entry into higher education, then the Daytona Beach Community College, when I fancied myself a surfer, ended with the first semester. So, a couple of short stories later, finding my employer’s business seized and padlocked, hitchhiking to Ohio, I was avoiding the draft in the Navy. Naturally, see my blog, Teacher’s Pet, the key is in there, I’d choose the Navy.

I was a young Boatswain’s Mate, the ship’s swimmer, and we were on an exercise off the coast of Hawaii – way off the coast, even from the bridge you couldn’t see the island. We’d ended the exercise because the seas, while calm, – it’s a Pacific thing – were running 10-15 feet and we needed to recover the small unmanned remotely controlled boat that had been part of the exercise. As the swimmer I got to go aboard the Boston Whaler and attach the  block (a technical bosun’s term) to the whaler so it could be hoisted back aboard the USS Gridley (DLG 21). I won’t take the time to fully explain what was happening or why self-compensating davits are important and will just tell you that with 10-15 seas Gridley was rolling 15 degrees to starboard then 15 degrees to port. That 60 degree difference would dump the block, a lot of heavy metal cable into the whaler on the roll to port and then yank it and the whaler up and out on the roll to starboard. Not what Boston Whalers are built for!

So when the whaler starts to break apart and I see that my safety line is hopelessly tangled in the block and cable I had cut myself loose and went overboard. It seemed a smart idea at the time – considering the condition of the whaler when it was recovered it still seems a smart idea.

But I was upwind of the Gridley and she was presenting a lot of surface area to the prevailing wind, actually leaving a shadow of wake as she sailed downwind. Being young, strong, a good swimmer, doesn’t mean you can out swim a situation like that. And, that’s when I started asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’.

And that’s about 1/50 th (a wildly unsupported statistic) of who I am.

Teacher’s Pet

by taohobo

Well, not me. I was probably Mr. T.F. Davies’ biggest headache. And, he died before I was mature, smart, brave… enough to tell him what an impact he’d had on my life.

He was constantly after me to read. It seemed a daily project, maybe it was only weekly, but I remember that he was unrelenting. Just taking a book, waiting a couple of weeks and returning it was not enough. He asked questions, lots of questions, questions that could only be answered if you’d actually read the book. Opening it, skimming, dog-earring some pages, nothing else would work. He knew those books hadn’t been read.

In his persistence he finally offered me a very slim book, funny that I don’t remember which it was. Just that it was a Sherlock Holmes story – suddenly I was hooked, deeply, the barbs fully imbedded. I wanted another. Then another. Finally I’d read all the Holmes books in our school’s small library. He found me more, playing me well, enough to reel me in but not enough to break the still delicate tippet.

From Doyle to Conrad, from Conrad to Michener… Each book about something I was interested in,  mysteries, the sea, adventure, the world. The written word has shaped my life and my insatiable curiosity is never sated. I wonder how much more I would have learned had I been teacher’s pet. Thank you Mr. Davies!

Teacher’s Pet