Now and Then and Forevermore

 Recently, it was my father's birthday.  Most years, I put his old boat in the water, get in it, and reminisce over the fine times we had together in that boat.  I remember that foggy river we traveled down at daylight, and his look when we got to that first throwline, and it had a large tug on it.  The struggle for me to net those large fish and the shared joy when the fish flapped back and forth in the bottom of the boat.  

And there were times we just filled the back of that boat up with big catfish, and he smiled a smile I can still see as I paddled the boat now around the pond.  But it is only a pond now.  Life is not a wilderness sort of river you travel miles down to run lines.  Now, in the pond, the boat just goes around in circles until I pull it up on the bank and go about a life as limited as paddling in circles in the pond.  

Shouldn't it be, though?  Doesn't life drift away like that?  I am decades older now, and life has traveled a river of its own for me. I am not that same person anymore.  I wouldn't spend all day the day before drinking beer,  seining bar ditches for bait for those lines we ran the next morning.  I wouldn't drink that much as we both did putting that boat in with all the equipment and putting out those lines.  Sometimes we had drunk so much we couldn't remember where we put some of the lines the next morning.  Needless to say, those days were not all sunshine and rainbows that I choose to remember paddling on the pond now.    That life, prettied up for selective memory now, had its rough edges then.  

God has got a hold of me.  Since then, priorities began shifting.   God began a shaping process that has taken off some of those rough edges I had acquired back then, and along my way to Him.  I love the memories, selective as they are, but I love the person I am becoming more.   I still have rough edges for God to work on until that day I see Jesus face to face.  But I can see His hand upon my life with a quick glance at the now and then, the before and after of my heart.

  The boat is still here.  So far, I am still here.  My father has been dead 42 years now, and that me on the river is gone forever.  But the Spirit of God within me will live within me, now and forevermore.    Praise God

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