It's been an interesting morning

Don't worry, I'll get back to our road trip.  Some things can't wait, so I'll tell you a story that seems sad, and yet...

First of all, I haven't been sleeping well at all lately... about four hours a night, the last four nights.  I go to bed at nine and go straight to sleep, but by one o'clock I'm wide awake.  I blame it partly on the full moon.  I lie in bed another hour trying not to toss and turn, and finally get up.  I don't make coffee yet, because I might feel like going back to bed soon (never happens).  So I've been sort of dragging around, half the time. 

I'm almost to the end of the Ricky Skaggs autobiography "The Kentucky Traveler" I've been reading.  It's taken so long because I get library books that I have to read within a certain time, so I save actual books I own to read when I'm between library books.  In telling his life story, Ricky talks a lot about his first real job as a musician, which was when he and Keith Whitley were teenagers and best friends. They went to work for the Stanley Brothers, bluegrass singers.  I've never gone out of my way to listen to bluegrass, but when Ricky would mention a song they did with the Stanley Brothers, I'd stop reading and tell Alexa to play the song.  I think this bluegrass thing might be growing on me. 

This morning I really wasn't in the mood to read, and told Alexa to shuffle the Stanley brothers.  I closed my eyes, and hoped sleep would find me.  One song came up that told a couple of favorite Bible stories I learned as a child, and I replayed a few times, thinking later I would write down the words and see if I could sing it.  I even shared the song on Facebook.  

First of all, here's the song:



Old Job, every rose in his garden had faded,
Every flower in his life had withered away.
Then he said, "I know my Redeemer liveth
And the roses for Job, they all bloomed again.

     The roses will bloom again, some morning,
     No matter how long the winter has been.
     When you see the rose of sharon in the beautiful garden,
     It's gonna come springtime again.

It was dark for Jacob when they brought him that coat,
And it seemed to him that Joseph was dead.
But things looked brighter when he saw the wagons coming
And the roses for Jacob had all bloomed again.

 When Cliff got up, I made his coffee and told him the dogs and I were going to go for a walk in the pasture.  I've learned if you feel sluggish, sometimes it helps to do something physical.  I put the camera in my pocket just in case I wanted to take pictures, and a handkerchief... because any time it's below 50, my nose runs.  The dogs had a great time.  At one point, they were both out of sight and didn't come when I called, so I got on the ground and started yelping like a hurt puppy.  That works every time, and they came bounding toward me.  I got up and we went on our way.  I noticed the river bottom covered completely by the flood and dug in every one of my six pockets (crazy coat), but my camera was gone.  My cell phone was there, so I did take the pictures.  I wasn't too worried about the camera because I was pretty sure where it was... somewhere around the spot where I sat down and yelped.  I knew I could just have Cliff take me back in the four-wheeler later before the rains start. Turns out I was right about where the camera was.

Cliff was waiting for a friend to call so he could go and borrow a trailer.  He got the call and went outside to leave, but came back in directly.  "I've got some devastating news," he said.  I paused, almost afraid to ask, but then said, "What is it?"

"The deep freeze in the garage has stopped working; the light's on, but all the meat is thawed."

"Is it still cold?  If it is, we can still re-freeze it."

Alas, juices were flowing out of packages; I held a package and sniffed:  it wasn't rotten, but it was beyond saving.  Both of us were speechless.  

"Well," I said, "if we can scoot the freezer over in front of the door, you could lift it up with the tractor and take it all down to the ditch."

"I'll call Arick (the grandson) to help," Cliff said.  I reminded him that the grandson was helping a friend move, so he isn't home.  "But I'll help," I told him.  "We were eating too much meat anyway."  (That's all I could think of to say.)

But as we were getting the job done, in my mind I heard my mother saying, as she did when things went wrong, "Well, it isn't a human life."

And then I thought about old Job and old Jacob, spoken of in the song, and I think I even smiled a little.  

We got that deep freeze loaded on the forks of the tractor easily, and Cliff drove it down in the pasture.  When he came back we didn't have much to say, but we hugged.

Cliff went on to pick up the trailer.  I thought of Job saying, "I know my Redeemer liveth", and remembered something else Job said later that wasn't in the song:  "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." 

I don't say a lot of spiritual things, and I'm not a model Christian.  But I know that my Redeemer lives, and though He slay me, I will trust Him to the bitter end.  Just like a friend I met a few years, Christine.  She had terminal cancer, surgeries went wrong, she died a miserable death.  But to the bitter end, she begged everybody to "know Jesus".  Boy, I miss that lady.

Christine

Why me?  Well, why not me?  Bad things happen to us all.