Ozark Thaw

The thaw has begun.  The removal of a week of ice and snow as the temperatures rise.  I love every season in this little holler where I live.  I love the fact that when I call it a “holler” and when I use the word “y’all” those closest to me smile because they know while it isn’t natural for me, it still comes naturally.  I was raised to use proper English, and yet my roots are in these Ozark Mountains where both of these phrases are, in actuality, quite proper.

I love that just two minutes spent on my front porch gives me more energy than any of those overly inflated promises on 2 ounce to 20 ounce bottles of marketing genius.  The sound of the thaw.  A delectabley blended recipe.  Drippings from branches, the running of the stream, the flutter of wings from a variety of native birds; cardinals, jays, tufted titmouse, juncos, and doves, just to name a few.  The intermittent tapping of a downy woodpecker.  The gentle ringing of the wind chime, a marker of the breeze of a changing season.  The sound of the release from a frozen creation sculpture.  Incomparable.

You Only Die Once

There is this seemingly innocuous belief that You Only Live Once (YOLO), and yet the antithesis is the actual truth.  In all reality, You Only Die Once (YODO), and this was correctly framed by Brother Lawrence.

You see, we will live again after death, and that for eternity.  But there is only one death, and linked to that death is a most grave decision.  How like the enemy of our soul to twist the truth slightly, repackage and redistribute for our fleshly consumption so that instead of living with both the urgency, and the peace, of YODO, we are driven to a frenzy of fulfilling our fleshly desires under the false premise of YOLO. 

There is an equal urgency in YODO, but the purpose is divine; a celebration that this first life in this fallible body and this broken world is not, in fact, all for which we are alive, that there is a glorious eternity available in our very near future.  A consistent knowledge of this can correctly frame today’s decisions.  Don’t believe the twisted truth of YOLO.  Instead, my friends, function today under both the urgency and peace of the divine truth, You Only Die Once.

“But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.”  -- Hebrews 9:26b - 28