Bowling for Taco’s

 

 

 

Yakima – the land of the Taco Bus.  Not Taco Truck – not Taco Conversion Van – Taco Bus.  School Bus, Grey Hound Bus – Taco Bus.

 

They did up Mammoths here, just down the road.  Real Mammoths – not mastodons – MAMMOTHS.  I went to a mammoth dig.  I saw people with bamboo skewers, trowels, and tattoo's – lot’s of tattoo’s.  Leading – if their forearms and necks are to be believed – much more varied, and exciting lives than I ever expected for archeology students.  That is assuming, perhaps wrongly, that most people who get exciting and daring tattoos get them because they lead exciting and daring lives.

 

And yet . . . I don’t know – sometimes I feel it’s the people who are to busy living to realize how exiting and daring their lives are, that I find myself drawn too.

 

Not the young hitchhiker I picked up a year ago on my way back from a fishing trip to Oregon who loved traveling the country without a plan.  But a quiet Dad who lives in Pullman, loving his wife and son, taking amazing pictures in his free time, while working hard at his job – too busy being a man to tell you all about it.

 

Picking up that hitchhiker, hearing his story of aimless drifting, time spent here – friends met there.  A sort of solo gypsy is what he modeled himself as – a lone wander, needing no fellow travelers in his life’s journey.  He seemed to me to be a man who was – was trying to find what out what he was looking for. 

You know what I mean, the nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something – only you’re not sure what it is.  Mentally you back track, you turn around and re-trace your steps, hoping some detail with stand out and remind you.  And the harder you try the more it slips and slithers – a splinter in your mind.  Exhausted you stop trying, hours – even days pass, and suddenly without prompting, without cause, without fanfare – the forgotten something is there.

 

I was given so much to process today.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

- 2nd Corinthians 1:3-4

There are deep wells of grace hidden within affliction.  Deep, and still.  Grace does not quench your pain – grace does not suppress it, it does not satisfy it, grace endures it.

Grace carry’s you through it.  The pain changes you, draws you closer to the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.  It preserves even when you cannot.  Especially when you cannot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Especially when you cannot . . .