You must fall so they can finally rise.

So much has happened since we last spoke.  I feel like I'm not even the same person now.

There have been

cloudbursts.

Spiritual

things.

And I was reading, a particularly Stoic section of scripture.  We might remember Paul disputing and debating with the Stoics in scripture, yet he also said he had to tailor his message for a given audience to promote the Gospel message, to "be all things to all people".

"I am a debtor to both the Jew and the Greek."

We don't give up on you, even if you've given up on yourself; I watched my nephew tear-up the other day, and I was thinking, "look what the expectations of the world did to this man".  And so I'm inclined to burn the world for his sake, to honor him.  To rough-up everyone else for my man's edification.

I ain't and won't give up on him.  Or Rick.  Does that sound like "Hope Springs Eternal"?  "Bros before hoes"?  This sounds like instead, you have one thing in life, after everything else is boiled away and taxed by the world.  All you got is a name, and you show it respect, no matter what everyone else thinks.

I know that boy has iron in him, somewhere, they just cut him a cartwheel, all them people around him, not knowing how to live, how to make it in the real world.

You might say I owe him a debt, and just because he was born, not for sake or by reason of anything else.

Anyway.  Any trouble I go through just makes my testimony stronger.  I think of the Hurricane, writing his memoir after being imprisoned all those years.  I think of the troubadour trying to capture the experience that he was living on the road, meanwhile just trying to sing stuff people liked, but having the real songs pounded at the edges of his skull, aching to get out.

Back in the day, 2015: I was the last one in the extended family to get saved, and its like, that accomplished, our matriarch could go home having completed her work, secured the souls of all her children.

But I aint forgot the lost and suffering.  The "sin sick", saying that, while we all a bit sin sick while we in this physical world.  It was Johnny Cash that even chose his stage clothing based on his attitude toward injustice and inequity.

Here I stand, a misguided Sandman figure, somewhere between the side of the angels, and rank villainy, caught in the switches and ready to bang against the sides of my cage, but also with eyes on eternity.  And I know some people, like nephew, get beat on and on by the world until they get mean.  I'm a long way from being really mean, thanks to being removed from Rockingham, NC.  In fact, I'm like the Jews in the diaspora that some of the saints wrote to.

"Consider it all joy when you fall into troubles."

"Tribulation creates patience."

"The trying of your faith builds patience."

And over a million and a half infected.  Gonna be more patients, Cheever, I wot.  And the southland just spread its butt cheeks for the virus, and all in the name of an idea, the idea of civil liberties, like its some kind of new Civil War, not fought with bullets, with their being an ante of PPE instead.