Dwelling Places

We are in awe of magnificent sunrises. We cherish crisp spring mornings, fragrant purple jonquils swaying in breezes, effervescent dew trickling, tickling velvet-like petals. We sense vibrance in buzzing bees and fluttering humming birds – indescribably magnificent things. But equally glorious are sunsets that are looked upon with a certain hope of a coming tomorrow. However, sunsets, though beautiful, remind us of the “end of things.” Dusk reminds us of the inevitability of our lives’ own sunsets. Our repetitive circular-like existence finally ends. No more sunrises. We live “from the rising of the sun to its setting” (Psalm 113:3) in a solar system of predictability, of rotations and revolutions, of the law of entropy. The death of things is a calculation of the second law of thermodynamics. Civilizations have called this wheel of time the circle of life. But, what if life is not really a closed circle, but rather more like an open spiral? What if life is really a dynamic up...

Two 9 year old boys headed talking and laughing down the shortcut on their way to the movies. Gallup, New Mexico, is an old mining town and the part of town I lived in was a little barrio built on Gallup's hill country where a number of old mines still exist like catacombs underneath the landscape. Alleys were popular shortcuts. And those adventurous shortcuts, we would use, even if encroaching on other people's property. Neighbors never really cared in those days. We were just neighborhood kids. Everyone knew everyone. No one locked their doors that remember. Nothing to steal. My friend and I were both named Tommy, and we would always try to circumvent the old barn house where they used to say Rollie Mortuary would keep caskets in storage. I remember distinctly that as a child, I didn't really know what a casket was, but I had heard the word "coffin."  Coffin, to a child, sounds unexplainably more creepy. Coffins were a part of the genre of the Dracula and Fr...