Crippled by Despair

A new dawn is breaking outside the window of this stone house where I sit in an overstuffed chair, listening to birdsong.

I have missed too many dawns in my lifetime. Work and children and a body tuckered by bouts of insomnia, or nightmares have kept me from the dawns.

Or maybe it was just the body rhythms. My best sleep too often comes as dawn breaks.

But oddly whenever I return to my native southland, my body reverts to an old familiar pattern and I rise before dawn.

There is inherent hope in first light. A joyfulness that can’t be bought, but that should always be greeted with head bowed

A new day.

A fresh beginning.

A whisper of

See, you get another chance

To love

To be loved

To honor

To be honored

To embrace

To be embraced

To dance

Or to stumble along,

Determinedly

Or happily

It’s a choice, up to each of us, what we do with the hope and promise of each new day.

Today I’m pondering something someone said

What if there is no end? asked the fellow sitting on  a stool before a crowd. What if all this goes on?

Then, how shall we live?

He’s right, I realized. We don’t have a plan for that.

We speak of doomsday as if its inevitable.

We consume apocalyptic literature and

24-7 news like a rabid dog devouring the dead

We prepare entire sermon series around it

And produce movies that create a hysteria of fear in the people.

We issue the warning: Be prepared

THE END is coming.

But we never stop to ask

What if it doesn’t?

What if morning light comes again,

And the hope that is inherent within?

All this despair over the expected apocalypse

cripples us

Leaving us incapable of stepping out  into the promise

of a new dawn

Shouldn’t we be asking,

What if

it goes on?

How shall we live then?