It was just over two years ago that I posted my first blog. Now 116 blogs later, so many of you have joined the long parade of faithful readers who have responded with your comments and stories and have shared the blog with friends and family when something I wrote brought them to mind.
Probably most of you have no idea why I started writing in this new form for me, or why I called it LOVE SONG TO MY LIFE. So, I will stop midstream to refresh my purpose for myself and for you who have signed on since.
When we are living our lives at breakneck speed, juggling many roles and making schedules that would have sent our parents to the psych ward (sent some of us there, too!) we don’t notice so many of the true treasures that whirl by because we are viewing them from a carrousel. Oh, we know they are there and maybe utter an obligatory prayer of thanksgiving in church or when we tuck the kids in at night--sometimes we even write a thank you note for some friend’s kind gesture--but most of the time, we’re just lucky to make it from morning to night without dropping some ball.
Maybe I felt an urgency to gather some moments into my conscientious focus because I sensed a slowing down time coming like a child spinning in a circle does just before she gets too dizzy to stand up and realizes the sidewalk is coming up to crack her head.
For whatever reason, what has transpired in the two years and 115 blogs since I started would never have been believed. A very contagious virus has brought our country and the rest of the world to a screeching halt. If someone had said to any one of us, “You need to just quit traveling, cancel your social and professional calendar, stop going to the office and church and school, do work and education from your bedroom computer, close down playgrounds and vacation spots, quit flying and shopping and having lunch with friends or business contacts,” we would have all answered in international unison, “NO WAY!”
But stop down we did, some of us for eternity as we have buried, mostly without funerals, 200,000 Americans. This has gotten our attention! The rest of us have had to totally rethink how we do life.
Bill said yesterday after our coffee, in our what’s-on-for-today time: “The bad thing is that I don’t have anything I have to do today.” Then he paused before going on. “And the good thing is that there is nothing I have to do today.”
We are songwriters. I am a lyricist. I’ve been writing the words to music for more than fifty-five years. I started the blog because of a lyric I wrote to not-yet-existing music. I wasn’t sure it was a song at all, but I gave the “poem” to Dony McGuire and said, “I don’t know whether this can have music. It may be a poem, and it may just be for me.”
I only knew it was the passion of my life to not miss the miracles of every morning, to see the love letters God has been writing to me with every sunrise and every drop of rain poised on the trumpet edge of the morning glory blossom before it drops to water the black earth. And to write back. To somehow register that “I got the post, Father; I got it!”
Good days and hard days, my life has been a correspondence with my Maker. Bill and I have written our life together in songs. If you were to lay our songs end-to-end for the last almost 60 years, you would have the only biography I may ever write. These are milestones of my journey.
And, also, like the series of pieces I wrote to settle the doubts of my soul, only to discover that they were written in response to Someone who was talking to me when I wasn’t talking to Him, and I had to admit that these were Simple Prayers, these pieces called a blog were love songs—love songs to my life.
So, I stop here midstream, as I said, to let you hear again the strange poem, now with the music Dony sent back to me, sung by the divine voice of his and Reba’s daughter Destiny. Please read your own story into these words and music. The good thing that has come from being “sheltered in place” with my husband and our life in our old house on our hillside is that what we “have to do today” is to pay attention, to notice, and to read the love notes scattered everywhere from our Father. And I will write back, too. These are--and will continue to be--the lived-out love songs to my life.
