Our Crazy Ancient New Religion 2

Posted on April 24, 2016 by ehurst

It was almost as if someone was crying, injured and unloved.

I turned to the bush and something made me look around behind, under the leaves and branches. There, stuffed in among the limbs close to the ground was an old rotting paper bundle, a multiple rocket launcher from some previous Independence Day celebration. It as all charred and brittle as I pulled it out. The bushed heaved a sigh of relief.

Fanciful imagination? Fine, but I did remove some pollution from the bush outside my apartment breezeway and felt a sense of divine approval in my heart. It’s the same when I pick up cigarette butts and other trash from the breezeway and grass around the building. I don’t do that because I’m some kind of prissy middle-class grouch who worries about appearances, nor is it merely because I can’t forget the military training that makes it almost an instinct to police up litter. I do it because it’s right for me.

It feels the same to me if I eat right or do something to assist my neighbors. It feels the same as reading the Bible or writing a blog post about my faith. It feels like riding my bike and taking pictures of beautiful landscape. It feels like blessing my Father’s name.

For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. (Romans 8:19-23 NKJV)

Westerners today call it anthropomorphism, but I assert that Hebrew minds took it seriously, sometimes quite literally, that Creation is alive and has a strong thread of God’s moral character. All Creation, your body included, cries out for redemption. The whole business of God’s revelation is to allow us some level of participation in that redemption by ameliorating the effects of the Fall. The Fall is how “creation was subjected to futility.” We embrace the Flaming Sword of divine moral truth, let it burn away our sinful nature, and strive to bring our world back into Eden.

It’s not a question of remaking the world to be like Eden, because the full measure is not possible without God’s final act of judgment on all sin. It’s taking the leverage that God places in your hands and doing what He has called you to do. I can pick up trash around my residence. I can stop on my bike rides and move large objects out of the road, or push aside broken glass. I can eat wild foods and exercise in ways my body tolerates. I can pray and read the Bible and tell others about my faith. But pulling trash out of my friend, the bush, is no less evangelism and redemption than writing books and giving them away.

Holiness is holiness, and the Law of Moses made it plain that God regards sanitation and health as loyalty. We need to break the very bad mental habit of compartmentalizing our religion. God created the heart to hear all of Creation groaning for relief so that we could get involved in His redemption.

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Psalm 98

Posted on April 23, 2016 by ehurst

This is another coronation song. The wording suggests a rather impromptu celebration of Jehovah’s reign based on some recent miraculous deliverance. In the Ancient Near East, a ruler asserted his dominion in the form of giving laws. However, it was nothing like modern Western legislation, but the ruler would declare what kinds of things would get his attention. He would then promptly pass judgment on any pending cases, not least charges of disloyalty against those who refused to declare allegiance upon his taking the throne. A king’s law presumed a personal loyalty to him and a desire to please him. This image is necessary to understand the expressions in this psalm.

The first verse emphasizes the celebration of some mighty deliverance of Jehovah’s people. He did it by His own hand, not by hiding behind some army of men. This was no mere announcement, but an assertion by power itself. The next two verses loudly proclaim that He demonstrated the power to defend His domain; there is no way anyone anywhere on this earth can dispute it. In particular, He showed His intention to defend Israel and His divine grant to her. Let none dare challenge them in their place.

The next triplet of verses encourages everyone to make a joyful noise with whatever musical talents they might possess. There is mention of ancient instruments and we might surmise this was composed before the Exile.

Indeed, it does seem to echo the sentiments of Isaiah’s latter chapters in the final trio of verses. In typical Hebrew fashion, Creation itself is personified in various elements. How easily Westerners forget that ancient people believed Creation was a living thing, and God Himself used such language. The oceans, rivers and mountains thunder with His praise; do we listen? How could we not join in this celebration? Behold, He comes to assert His dominion over all Creation — mercy to the loyal, but wrath on those who oppose Him.

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Cycling: North Hills Photos

Posted on April 23, 2016 by ehurst

01NotFloodedNowFrom the bridge you can see that it’s not flooded any more. I’m going to guess that, over the past two days since my adventure through the swampy forest in the background, that pond must have drained completely. It looks like it would have been waist deep on me had I tried to wade across, deep enough to knock me off my feet with any flow rate at all.

02Farmland1Today was just a gentle ride into the north hills, up Midwest Boulevard to Memorial Road and back down on Douglas to Hefner and then home. My objective was just shooting a few pictures. The difference is that the temperatures are up a bit and I left earlier than usual and got a different sun angle.03Farmland2 We got farmland, riverscapes and a section of woodland that had burned in a vicious wildfire a few years back. Feel free to steal this images and post them as header pictures on your own blog, or whatever you want to do with them.

04Burnout05Evergreens

06Farmland3

07CountryRd08Farmland409NCanRiverscape

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Our Crazy Ancient New Religion 1

Posted on April 23, 2016 by ehurst

Have you ever wondered why the Law of Moses is loaded with what seems mere sanitation measures?

Anyone with some knowledge of modern health sciences tends to notice how much of what Moses called “divine justice” is just common sense healthy choices for folks in that time and place. Does it make divine justice a little less divine? Only if your approach to religion lacks the heart-mind. To a Western rationalist, it is utterly necessary to understand all things from human reason. Once a rational answer is found, the discussion is ended: “We know what this is.”

No, you don’t.

Holiness as defined by that ancient religion was not in the ritual. It was a heart-led religion and culture, not a rational and materialistic culture. The ritual was reaching for a holiness totally outside reason. If all you had was ritual obedience, you could get by. There would be things that you wouldn’t like, things that didn’t make sense, but you would at least not get into trouble with your community. For a lot of folks, that was reason enough, because most people would hardly survive outside of their community.

But that would not carry the whole nation. Someone in leadership had to understand with their hearts, not just their heads, that the rituals had a far deeper reason. It was more than simple tradition as most folks today think of it. It was holiness in the sense of wholeness, of being consistent with reality. It was seeing beyond mere function to the moral heart of the matter.

Ritual and tradition are not strong enough. Health science is not strong enough, either. It has to be something that pulls at you from another realm, something that empowers you to walk, not so much in slavish obedience, but in the joy of finding your real self.

It’s true that some of the rituals of Moses are incomprehensible to us today. Part of the problem is centuries of intellectual drift so that we have virtually no one translating today who grasps the heart-led analysis, so we get garbled English renderings. I’m not superior to them, so I set aside those things if I can’t come up with a guess that brings me a sense of peace. But for the most part, the Law of Moses is contextual morality, and genuine holiness with God looks a lot like just plain good health. But making that connection straight across from human reason to human results misses the whole point.

We have to climb up into the moral sphere before we can understand what’s going on here.

Creation bears the stamp of God’s character. That should be obvious to anyone who can swallow the idea of God as Creator. It’s His design and consistent with His Person and character. But it’s alive, not inert — He said that. Thus, it responds to His touch in a very personal and living manner. It responds to the only signature it knows: His divine character. So when some other source manifests His character, how can Creation not respond to that, as well? God says the key to knowing and recognizing Him is a matter of moral character. Moral character is visible only from the heart-mind. The intellect cannot read such things; it knows only the mechanics of things.

Your fleshly body is a part of Creation. If you harmonize with His moral character in regards to your body, you will be as healthy as you can be on this earth. It’s the same as when you act in Creation aside from your fleshly body. Doing what’s right for Creation is right for your body, and vice versa. Nail this down: holiness and health are linked. Not where our intellect can see the link, but the heart alone can see it. The link apparent to our intellect is missing a lot of depth.

Our heart seeks to conform to the Creator’s love. This will, of necessity, conflict with the advice you get from health professionals at times, just as conforming to the other parts of Moses’ Law conflict with human evaluations of justice. They cannot see the moral fabric of Creation, and cannot justify in their reasoning what God requires. Creation is dead and inert to human reason.

Much of what we do in obedience to our Creator’s loving guidance turns out to be healthy for our bodies, but that’s not really the point for us.

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Cycling: River-Grand Loop

Posted on April 22, 2016 by ehurst

01BricktnCanalNo mud today! I’m trying to get used to riding longer distances on pavement again; as previously noted, Jeanette does things different from the Edgewood. Today’s route was the River Trail (north bank) to Grand Boulevard Trail. That meant heading west on NE 4th to Bricktown. Our first shot is the southern end of the Bricktown Canal.Canal-RiverDrop It’s totally artificial, and quite some ways above the level of the river. Where to two come close, it’s quite a drop from the canal dock to the boat dock. This second shot was my attempt to show the switchback sidewalk between them. (Jeanette will get her kickstand next week.)

02LandRunMemThis multi-piece life-sized bronze memorial to the Land Run looks like it runs across the canal. I’ve noticed you’ll never see monuments to the Land Run alongside any monuments to the Native Americans whose land was stolen to make the Land Run possible. US history is shot through with treaties between the federal government and various tribes, all of which were promptly broken (by the US government) in various ways. We owe them, but you’ll never get anyone to take that seriously.

03RockClimbGymOn a lighter note, this old grain elevator was converted to a rock-climbing gym. Most of the action is inside, but you can just make out a couple of climbing tracks running up the outside of the structure. All of these first few photos were fairly close together.04RiverTrailBTwnEntr I made a game of rolling down the switchback, then cruised under the Interstate, a rather long and very dark passage out to the Chesapeake Boathouse dock area. The image on the left here is looking back toward that tunnel from the bridge over that artificial cove where the riverboat rides dock and the bike trail ends.

05FrmrRailBridgeAll along the River Trail I greeted the trees close to the path. It’s pretty curvy and hilly for a ways until you get past Walker Avenue heading westbound. I decided to take a quick look at this former rail bridge. While there’s evidence of motor vehicle traffic, I’ve read somewhere the Parks Department plans to turn it into a bike bridge, but not before they do a ton of expensive refurbishing.06OldHouses The ride was largely uneventful until I remembered that I wanted to get a look at the vestigial rump of a very old neighborhood left standing between the river and the rerouted I-35 near May Avenue. I pasted these two shots together. In previous decades these houses were part of a community that flooded way too often before the authorities raised low dikes along the banks of the river.

07WaterTruckAs I was working my way back down to the river trail, I came too close to a pair of Canadian geese with their goslings. The gander flew up at me, but I pushed against his breast and he nearly flopped on the ground, deciding it was better to flee than try again. Just a short time later I spotted this paddle-wheeler heading downriver, likely from the work they had been doing upriver at the Meridian Avenue bridge. He was still not quite as far down as Dell Campus; by the time I got to the end of the north bank trail and crossed the bridge, I had time to come back and catch up with him from behind on the south bank trail before I turned off to head south. That rig works the same as a truck, with a flat bottom and dirt scraper on the front.

08ParkwaySo the connecting route from Dell runs about a mile south and up hill to a park and that steep, humpy bridge over I-44. That drops down into another park and the start of the Grand Boulevard Trail. This next shot shows the original meaning of “parkway” — a green strip down the middle with one-way streets on either side. This is what the southern loop of Grand Boulevard looks like for several miles, running right where SW/SE 36th would be.

09Townley1I was all the way around to the end of the Grand Boulevard Trail when I remembered that it ends right near the old Townley Dairy. At one time, this area was all dairy farm. I can recall even into my adulthood that I could call and get Townley to deliver to my residence twice weekly.10Townley2 But the big conglomerate Farm Fresh wanted this market, so they bought out Townley, then fired the owner, Guy Townley, and closed the place down sometime around 1993. On the other hand, Guy was third generation and had been accused of running the place into the ground already. Someone has been using it for parking and storage, but a couple of arson fires and at least one tornado have made a mess of the building.11Townley3 The place is huge and I rode around to get different angles. Still, the place is up for sale and includes about six acres of pasture. You can learn more about it on the Abandoned OK site.

12TownleyHouseJust a little ways down toward Reno on the same street is what I have been told is the old Townley home. Other business have moved into the facilities on this end of the street. The old dairy plant was hardly the whole operation; it was spread for a couple of blocks. There was also a bunch of crackerbox houses for employees lined up along this and another street parallel, one named Townley and other Eckroat. Eckroat’s name has been moved over to a turf seed company, but they used to do animal feed and related stuff. They still have a ranch that I pass often when riding north on Midwest Boulevard; the ranch at Britton Road sells the one-ton hay rolls.

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Our Crazy Ancient New Religion: Introduction

Posted on April 22, 2016 by ehurst

Another series? Yes, I’m crazy and you have to live with it — or stop reading this blog.

What’s the difference between a fresh revelation from God versus a coalescence of focus from knowledge you already had? There is no functional difference. Your heart already knows everything God can tell you, because it’s not a matter of repository knowledge, but exploring stuff already open to you. Please, drop the mythology about how prophets knew they were called to prophesy, and how they got their messages from the Holy Spirit. They were called and got the message. The promise that we could all access the same repository of prophetic truth is ancient:

And it shall come to pass afterward
That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions. (Joel 2:28 NKJV)

Peter quoted this in Acts 2 regarding the first Christian Pentecost. Don’t overly mystify the miracles of God; that’s a lie from Satan designed to keep you from seeking the full power and benefits of God’s mercy and love, His vast blessings poured out after the Fall. The power of the Holy Spirit isn’t something that resembles inexplicable “magic.” You might not manifest everything flashy from the Bible, but you can know the power of God in your life.

But you can’t know it from your head. Your intellect is fully incapable of “escape velocity” into the moral grasp of God’s ways. It requires you awaken the link we all could have between the intellect and brain in your chest. The heart has its own independent nervous system and brain to process it. The heart has a sensory field that crosses time-space boundaries to see reality as God made it, in light of His divine moral character. So the biggest task we have is teaching our minds to submit and learn from the heart-mind.

Faith is a moral commitment of the heart to that higher realm and the God who made all things. Religion is the human response to the demands of faith. One man’s religion is another man’s headache. Faith will surely distill into a range of common response, so we can share some of our religion with each other. However, as you all know, I assert that Western Christians draw religious boundaries entirely too close to the individual life. You’ve read the sermon lots of times here. What Western Christian religion looks like frankly denies the power of God to work in the heart by insisting that religion must first and foremost follow reason and ignore the heart where they conflict. It’s religion with a lot of dead faith.

Yet, it’s not as if you can just make stuff up that amuses you and hold it forth as normative. That in itself indicates a fatal flaw, a disconnection between faith and religion. That brand of creativity is mere petty arrogance. Genuine faith seeks; it calls on God for guidance and looks for ways to meet other people of faith where they are. We seek common ground, but it does require discernment to distinguish between breaking false boundaries without transgressing very real boundaries drawn by God. It’s more art than science, but an art of the heart, not mere human talent.

So here’s the deal: I’m going to propose some religious ideas. They aren’t really description, but more characterization. You decide which of them your mind recognizes as consistent with your own heart. Then you get to decide how much it matters, in terms of the distance you might want to keep between us so that our missions from God don’t conflict.

That in itself is a religious idea, so we’ve already started. This series should at least be amusing, in nothing else.

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Cycling: Muddy Banks

Posted on April 21, 2016 by ehurst

ScreenshotI still hate mudding, but I wanted to do this before it got hot. Biting creatures will own the area very soon.

Here’s an aerial view of today’s ride with numbers to indicate the location for each shot I took in order as they appear below. The route was the south bank of the North Canadian River between NE 10th and Midwest Boulevard.01CherryCreek The starting point was not quite from the NE 10th Street bridge (lower left corner of the map), because satellite recon showed a significant tributary that with no viable ford after the recent rains. Our first shot looks back upstream from the confluence. On NE 10th, that meant backing off from the river to a secondary bridge and beyond that almost to the railroad tracks.02ApproachingNE23rd I was able to navigate the barriers placed for motor vehicles, but this is all public recreation area. I did see a couple of motor vehicles, but enforcement is very poor until non-motor users start complaining.

The next image shows the view approaching NE 23rd (marked Hwy 62 on the map). It’s pretty nice at this point and there are multiple packed trails and plenty of solid soil under the grass, but the grass is very deep after heavy rains and as yet un-mowed.03ApproachingNE36th However, it got steadily more challenging the farther I went. In this next shot I am approaching NE 36th and off to the right is a large puddle of stagnant water. The banks tend to rise to the cut bank, sloping down just a bit toward the dike, so at one point I dodged a massive mud puddle by riding just a hand’s breadth from the cut-bank. One wrong twitch and I’d be swimming.

04GatewayUnknownIt was tricky finding a useful path under the NE 36th Street bridge, and it was the end of the wide open banks. Instead, there was a long stretch of trail through the woods. This next image was the “gateway.” The occasional puddle like the one you see always came with some marginal dry passage one side or another, so I never got more than just a little sand on Jeanette.05NoRiver2See

The forest was thick with natural regrowth roughly my age. Just off-camera in the woods to my right is an early landfill back in the days when everything was buried in long trenches. So the camera struggles to handle the dappled sunlight effect of mixed canopy overhead. It was at least a mile before I saw the river again.06GlimpseRiver The view was not inspiring, but I finally spotted the river as the trees gave way to more open spots and the path turned toward the cut bank. Eventually it really opened up completely for awhile.07InClear The next shot on the left is looking back the way I came. So far the puddles have been manageable. I came to a long embankment where a sand extraction company had pushed it up from scraping the cover off the soil.08GettingMucky There was a bit of humpy-jumpy over more of this before dropping back down onto the original trail. Of course, a drop meant a higher water table. It was getting mucky. You can see an artificial lake from sand extraction in the background there, just a very little ways below the ground level.

At first, I managed to dodge the worst, but poor Jeanette was taking on more and more mud. The next mile was quite rough and my feet got completely soaked from a couple of times I had to catch myself before falling off. This is stagnant water, folks — stinky.09EndInSight Now if it had simply splashed on my shoes a little, it would be no big deal. But I got them totally soaked, and that meant the smell would be forever lodged in the urethane mid-sole layer. I looked at them and told them I was going to miss them. But I kept them on until I got home. Eventually I could see the bridge through the opening in the trees. On the one hand, I had managed to stay on the bike almost all the way through this nasty mess. On the other hand, she was caked.10DirtyGirl That nasty, stinking mud mixed with grass and other rotting foliage had worked into the brakes, the derailleurs, and half-way up my calves. I stopped at the final bank and scraped off what I could, pushing it out of the working parts.

11NoCrossingTo my dismay, the rocks that had been left lying along the bank had been removed, and the underlying sandbar had washed away. There was no way I could wade across because the water was simply too high. That was puzzling because the stream had always been insignificant. There was nothing for it but to go back the three miles or so the way I had come. I tried an alternate route, but all it did was allow me to see where the artificial lake had breached its dam. That explained the high volume of water overnight. That sandbar was there yesterday, as were some rocks now gone.

I decided not to ride back out until I got past the humpy spot, because I knew it would only cake a ton of mud back on Jeanette and I was just a little worried at the gears, chain and derailleur already muddy and gritty. I came back out near NE 36th, climbed the bank and took Sooner Road south to Reno and thence just a mile eastward home. After an hour of washing, she’s all clean and oiled up again. Lord, how I hate mudding!

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Bible History Note: Invasions

Posted on April 21, 2016 by ehurst

What we see in the Bible as historical narrative is hardly the only thing happening in those places at that time. There is a wealth of historical background that the writers assumed readers would know. They wrote for their own people.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to all the depth of scholarship that was so common back when I went to college. Today I hear and read people spouting stuff that they simply made up, leaping to conclusions when data seems to coincide. Better answers aren’t that hard to find, though I realize that it means going to a real library with paper books and reading stuff written long ago. Sadly, some of the best history and archaeology never made it onto the Net.

Today we estimate that Abraham was called to serve God and leave his home around 2100 BC. While it was rare for an urbanized man to join the wandering clans of nomadic herders, he wasn’t all that noticeable. Aside from his peculiar cultural ways, he was part of a very large number of nomads. Palestine was thinly settled, somewhat forested and there was plenty of room for him among the other roving tent-dwellers. There were rivalries and raids, but nothing we would call “warfare” most of the time. What made Abraham stand out was a considerably longer life-span than was common in Palestine. Mortality among the locals was largely a matter of cultural religious practices that mandated very bad sanitation practices. The wandering tribes tended to live a little longer, but Abraham was ancient by their standards.

A century later, we see evidence of a rising presence of far larger groups and more warlike. Their religions were also pretty rough, including some morally repulsive rituals. We can’t guess their identities in any meaningful terms, only their presence and some differences. A large number of towns and cities in Palestine were destroyed or taken over and the ethnic mix changed a bit. By the time Israel’s clan goes down into Egypt, things got really busy in Palestine. Substantial nations washed over the area from all directions, each conquering the one before, and it was truly chaotic, a bad time to live in that land.

This was when the truly nasty religions mentioned in the Bible make their appearance in archaeological evidence. That doesn’t mean they weren’t there before, but that now they were leaving traces that we can dig up with very large shrines and such. We also find evidence through third party mention of them, both the invaders and the large pagan cults that arose. This was when sacrificing children to Molech became rather common. Life was chaotic and fearful at best, and extreme practices were just a part of it.

When Israel invaded and began the conquest of Palestine, those other raiding tribes were still doing their business. Israel was different, but the locals experienced them as just another warring nation taking and destroying and occupying. Meanwhile, don’t be surprised to discover that a large number of Israel’s relatives had never left the land, but had managed to keep their villages alive and something close to Yahweh worship in the mix of religions (Shechem, for example). But when the Bible lists the places conquered and destroyed by Israel’s army, you should get a clue: those were the centers of degrading heathen religions. They didn’t conquer every Canaanite city, nor did they tear down every shrine or temple, on those that were nasty by just about anybody’s standards.

What we see in later history in the Bible are attempts to revive some of these nasty old cults. Most of them included degrading sexual practices as ritual. This stuff was destructive of stable family life and spread diseases. It summoned demonic presence and created an awful moral havoc that we can scarcely picture. What made things so bad was that too often during the Conquest, Israel was unwilling to finish the job, so some of this trash was left among them to tempt them. Honestly, if the average modern saw some of the nasty stuff these people did, you’d be horrified and consider killing them, too.

Leaving some folks and their towns alive was not the problem; it was the kind of folks Israel failed to drive out.

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Cycling: Deep Fork and North Coltrane

Posted on April 20, 2016 by ehurst

01KatyTrailOvercast and cool most of my ride today. I started with the Katy Trail and headed north. After several days of heavy spring rains, and before the mowers get around to it, this is the Katy Trail looking northward approaching NE 16th. If green is a favorite color, you are in luck today.

02RemingtonHorseHotelI left the Katy Trail at Remington Park. Cutting across their massive acreage of paved parking, I caught this view of the horse hotel across the north end of the race track. This all sits down on one of the few flat spots along the Deep Fork River. As noted before, the Deep Fork drains through some of the most rugged urban terrain I’ve seen in the US, and plenty of it is still near a wild state.03DeepForkMLKing Unfortunately, after more than a dozen tries at different times and locations, I’ve not been able to get a good shot of the steep ridges in this part of town. But here’s a shot of the river with a little extra flow viewed from the bridge on Martin Luther King Boulevard. It swings right and drops over a short rapids where you see that gravel bar across it.

04PigeonMuseumUp on NE 63rd and east a ways are a couple of houses with large pigeon coops, but there is also this American Pigeon Museum next to the American Racing Pigeon Union (I think their websites suck). Up on top of the ridge is a health complex that houses some university health sciences extension and part of the Oklahoma County Health Department. It’s got a lovely fitness track out back, but no bikes allowed. There’s a decent view back down to the valley floor but the trees hide it from the camera.

05-6520NBryantStaying on NE 63rd eastward, once I came out under Interstate 35, I turned left up Bryant Avenue for once. Right away I ran across this lively little house that is probably doomed given the development going on out there.06DeepForkV-NBryant Climbing up the ridge where a side road passes over the Interstate, I turned and saw this wide vista looking down onto the Deep Fork Valley. You can see evidence of construction in the foreground, and the camera fails to capture the rapid rise of the far ridge.07DeepForkWilshire Coming back down and turning right on Wilshire, I shot back upstream on the Deep Fork. This is looking south; please note that this is the higher end of the Deep Fork before it really starts to cut deep outside of NE OKC.

08PastureEWilshire With all the deep woodlands around these parts, I thought this view up an open pasture was refreshing. At the top of this long climb, Coltrane cuts north-south across my path and I turned right (south), having never seen any of it before.09-7700NColtrane The first thing I encountered was this unique little house. It reminds me of stuff built in northern climates with so few windows. Coltrane rises a ways, and then drops down into this lovely little valley.NColtrane-twdNE63rd Many of these houses have been out here since this was all dirt roads. Off up the next rise and to the left is a collapsed stone house down by a creek, but I couldn’t get the camera to pick it up through the thick greenery. Getting closer wasn’t an option because of the fresh sprouts of poison ivy on what used to be the driveway. It’s getting that time of year here.

The whole time I was checking for the presence of open trails, even though it was too wet to pursue any of them just yet. There’s at least one along the river in a couple of places between NE 63rd and Wilshire, but a lot of the land up here is fenced and private. Indeed, most of the houses were screened from view by long-standing forest growing up against the pavement. Another mile south on Coltrane brought me to NE 50th, where I turned left (east) and headed over the watershed to the North Canadian. Crossing Sooner Road I dropped down to a spot were the river comes within a short distance of the ratty old blacktop road. It was not at all picturesque, so I continued north back up the NE 63rd, east to Midwest Boulevard and back south to stop for lunch at the bridge.10CranesNCan-MWBlvd I’ve noted in the past the workmen are trying to fill in the space behind the rip-rap wall they constructed where the river bends under the bridge. However, there is a small stream that feed in from behind this spot and white cranes were fishing in the quiet pool formed back there against the sand bank.

You can probably see a bit of track running back up the bank behind them. That’s the end of the trail that runs along the south bank of the river. On my next journey, I’ll try to ride that trail starting way down by NE 10th and coming north to see if it’s actually open all the way.

11IndianPaintBrushesSo heading back home on Midwest Boulevard, I spotted this carpet of Indian Paint Brush flowers in the former grassy airstrip just south of NE 36th Street.

Today wasn’t nearly as long as rides I took on the Edgewood, but Jeanette just doesn’t like to hurry. This ride was unusually hilly because that’s how it is riding anywhere near the Deep Fork River. See you next ride.

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Veiled Compassion

Posted on April 20, 2016 by ehurst

It’s not from me; it uses me.

It’s hard to apply the compassion of my heart to people I’ve never met. What I can do is hold that compassion out there where others can see it. I already know by experience that most folks will recognize it on some level, but what they make of it varies. Precious few will actually have some grasp of its nature and celebrate with me.

I won’t claim to actually understand it.

There’s a huge question hanging in my mind right now. In the past, I knew that talents and skills were just tools to surrender to that compassion. Sure, I found entertainment in learning about computers; it scratched an itch. And I knew that my ability to fix them was a gift God could give to others. So I continued with an enthusiastic exploration of things I could figure out and keep helping folks in little ways.

And I suppose I wasn’t really too shocked when my enthusiasm for all of that died. I didn’t just toss away the knowledge and skills, whatever passes for expertise, but it has become work. I don’t mind doing work, but I certainly don’t mind when some chores take care of themselves. Fixing computers doesn’t bring a sense of peace and contentment. It’s a valuable tool, but realistic or not, I long for a time when, either they didn’t pollute our world so much, or we simply didn’t need them to carry out the gospel mission. I’ll keep using them until that day comes.

What I don’t understand is the bicycle and photography thing. Fun, yes, but there’s more. There’s a powerful moral purpose at work here, an action of compassion, but for once I don’t see how they bless others. At least, I don’t see how the harvest of blessings matches the depth of drive in me. Sure, the chatter about riding and exploring is a good thing, and the pictures of stuff you won’t normally see is entertaining. But for the life of me, I can’t yet see why I felt it was so morally necessary that I ride through West Elm Creek Valley Monday and take just a few pictures. (Actually I took more than I posted, but not all of them were worth sharing.) Sure, I learned something I didn’t know — the second lake is already on the way — but I can’t see how that is such a big deal. My conscious mind still doesn’t see why it was so important, only that it was important. It was like a sacred time in itself and I simply cannot see through that veil.

Curiosity and my sense of wanderlust don’t explain it. Were it merely my personal inclinations, I’d be out riding in far distant areas with more popular scenery. Today I have a divine appointment to ride to another area just a few miles away that I’ve not seen, and again it’s important that I take a few pictures. I’m not documenting anything, or I’d sense a need for far more images. One or two good shots and I know I’m done. But for some reason, the mere act of sharing them on the other blog doesn’t seem the end of the matter.

My theory for now is that I’m doing this in preparation for something that, if I knew what it was too soon, the knowledge would ruin things. Meanwhile, I’m puzzled how something that looks and feels like a retiree’s hobby can have such a powerful moral drive behind it. It’s a mission from God wrapped in a veil. Compassion says I must keep at it.

Yeah, I pray for a better camera, but a larger burden on my heart is the need to hear from God what really matters in all of this. If not some kind of “why” explanation, I would at least need the assurance that comes from obeying, and the assurance that I know I am obeying. Somebody will get a blessing from this, and I need to make sure it’s as lavish as I can make it for the glory of our Creator.

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