Further Along My Passage

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Canadian geese in flight

Author A. C. Gray shares journals written over a span of 30 years.  These journals were originally written and shared with friends encountered in his work and travels all over the globe during his lifetime careers as an officer in the US Air Force, American National Red Cross, the US Peace Corps, The World Bank, and other academic, federal, and nonprofit organizations.  They recount his life experiences and lessons learned all within the context of his Christian faith and his unique perspective of what living really means.  Published 5 Mar 2015

Available @ Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Bookmasters.com, Atlas Books.com



This website continues my monthly journals "Letters from Arbreux","Measuring My Days", "Labri Journals", (no longer online) and "Savoring My Passage" (still online at acgray.tripod.com). I welcome your comments at my new email address:

ACGRAY@ACGRAY.US       OR send mail to: 

109 Cliff Custer Court

Bridgewater, VA  22812-1763

Autumn leaves # 2

Autumn has arrived full blown and the year begins its rapid descent into history. Perhaps a sage will someday write of these moments of uncertainty, of a world on the brink of drama and life changing events, not unlike other times through which the old have lived. This October we might, if we wish, catch the magic and mystique of our world grown older and wealthier in the treasure of falling leaves beneath our feet, mellow with sumptuous hues like silk carpets from old Samarkand. Looking back at the summers of our life, successes have had their meaning; failures, too, but those have deeper meaning. What gives them all meaning is that they work together toward the fulfillment of Gods plan, writes Paul Tournier, in his book, The Seasons of Life. A consolation prize for old age is to discover, perhaps anew, the real meaning of life. To cling to the past, to seek most doggedly to prolong ones time of action means precisely this: living a useless old age, writes Tournier. It is the pressing need to find meaning for ones life, to subordinate the whole of life to that meaning. It is this need, this inner aspiration, which is from God. All the ideologies, doctrines, and formulas drawn up by men will pass; every ideal too, grows old in turn. Only the true and living God remains. Thus the knowing encounter with the living God is the greatest possible human event: the human experience par excellence....It is this knowing which remains as the common denominator of all lifes stages.

Autumn Leaves

 

Last month I spent three days at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. While there I read again Henry Beston'slyrical and classic book, The Outermost House, from which the following excerpt was edited:

 “No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from each other, each one individually busy for his body’s sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined….My special interest is the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does this will to suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know and obey it in such an instance of time? Schools of fish, I am told, make similar mass changes of direction….We need another wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by compli-cated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incomplete-ness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not our brethren, they are not our underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. “ The Outermost House by Henry Beston –[edit acg]

Autumn Leaves

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Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.  For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:37-39
 
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