My 5 year old son is a prodigious picture drawer. 10 Years ago when my parents cleaned out 50 years of accumulated stuff in my deceased grandparents home they found a whole stack of sketches, cartoons and drawings I had made when I was a boy. My grandmother treasured each and every one and kept them for for 25 years. My parents added them to the bonfire that night and in one minute part of my recorded history was incinerated.
Last evening my boy bought me a picture that he had quickly sketched. Not one of his best and besides a short thank you and a cursory glance, I did not give it the attention it deserved. Looking at it again this morning I am just dead chuffed that my son thought me worthy of one of his many works and it has blessed me today with warm feelings.
Relationships seem to be this week's theme for me. Relationships change like the seasons and friendships are not excluded from this dynamic. I can count my closest friends in my whole life on a few of my best nose picking digits. Yes, of course there are different types and levels of friends. One of the types of friends that I have is the kind of people that I just naturally click with. In that category fall my friends whom I call the "Maranatha Vets of Factnet".
These guys carry between them a millennium’s worth of gracious wisdom forged in God's fiercest fires. (Factnet is a cult discussion board and it has a whole section devoted to Maranatha church and the ministries that came from it.) Many of them were ministers in what was a very dysfunctional and abusive church. For some reason 15 years after Maranatha's demise these guys still have something to articulate and give to those who were part of Maranatha and its errant children. Much of their posts veer far away from the didactic preachiness you would expect from these guys. Instead they go out of their way to show the rest of us young uns that there is real freedom and life in Christ by expressing themselves as authentic and amusing people.
Sorry about the picture quality. I used my cellphone on this one.
Joshua (5 years 2 months), Nola (35) and Jason Coates(34) near the top of Cathedral Peak. The hike normally takes 22 hours and we did it by chopper in far less. (I am not Jewish, Greek or Lebanese. My muscles are hibernating for the winter.)
Joshua and Unimpressed Lanner Falcoln. This was a a raptor demonstration near Monk's Cowl in the Drakensberg Mountains.
The handler explains that Birds shield their prey with their wings and this is called "mantling" or "to mantle".
The Boss and Mini-me.
Champagne weather
Nola and Josh climb a statue of an Eland. This animal was sacred to the Bushmen of Southern Africa. The Eland is known as the antelope in Africa with the most fat on its body. It certainly is!
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