My CMS The View from a New City

Another very interesting video. I should link it to my mysteries app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McUvvaCMzk0

I just watched this and am moved to recommend it as good and true to everyone I know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGrYL0diuxo

When I was a soldier in Vietnam, one day our little column was moving through the jungle, somewhere between Saigon and the Cambodian border. As we came over a rise, I saw jungle stretched out before us with its meadows, rivers and streams. Even though the spirit of war and the threat of death hung over everything, the view was so beautiful that it still lives in my memory. Recently I had the opportunity to return to Vietnam and revisit the area where I served. The jungle was all gone, turned to a multitude of little rubber tree plantations. The place I had seen no longer exists. This experience has caused me to move from a view of the world as a collection of objects and toward the view of the world as a series of events. You can never step into the same river twice.

I am neither rich, nor famous. I have published no books, nor won any great awards. It seems the headwinds of life have been blowing throughout my career. I had to sue my longest term client to overcome its breach of contract and get compensated for years of faithful work. etc… Sometimes I feel like reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
……..

But when I do, I know it is a lie. Our first child was born when I was making a dollar an hour, milking cows. I had to check our third child out of the hospital using a credit card. Without patron or much in the way of visible means of support, my wife and I raised, clothed and educated six children. We are now the proud progenitors of twenty five ( soon to be twenty six) souls. And there appears to be no end in sight. Truly an eternal blessing that flows without compulsory means forever. Even in hindsight, I can’t account for how we pulled it off. Only by the grace of God.