Come Monday, it'll be all right

For more than 700 posts, 500 or more that have come from this room, I've written. I've written of the death of two dear pets. I've written of about every moral-political idea you and imagine that has been in the news. I've written of the death of a newspaper I've loved. I've written of a football team I've loved that has had a near-death experience, as well. I've written, slitting a figurative wrist as Red Smith once wrote, and letting the words flow.

Come Monday, as the noted philosopher from Margaritaville Jimmy Buffett once wrote, it'll be all right.
Come Monday, the movers come, life changes, and we pack up all our cares and woes and here we go.
Come Monday, we head to a new town, a new house, a new environment, a new culture. No more country climate; now we'll head to crawfish fields and something called boudin, and people called Cajun with a dash of French (I still have two, maybe three sentences in me from four semesters at Mississippi State).
Come Monday, my accent begins to clash with theirs.
Come Monday.

I was continuing my reading in Isaiah today when I came across these words (which are hard to read because my desk lamp went capooie this morning in a wave of symbolism); "Listen to me, distant nations, you people who live far away; before I was born, the Lord chose me and appointed me to be his servant."

Oh, do I believe that. Oh, am I unworthy of that.

There are dear people we're leaving behind. The list, I'm afraid, is much too small, those folk who we will never, never forget. But one can't lead if one is too close to the flock, someone said. I've tried hard to believe that, failing at times, becoming too close on occasion. I pray I did all I could in this ministry, but I leave it, literally and figuratively, on Sunday.

But come Monday everything changes. We drive like some modern Gypsies, headed not into the unknown as someone told me, but into the mission, into the calling that is what we do as ministers, pastors, preachers, teachers, lovers of the flock, leaders of the flock, shepherds of the meandering, murmuring, flock.

Come Monday, we see if what has worked, works again; or do we change as the environment changes? Come Monday, we keep on keeping on keeping on

I'm writing these final words of the blog from the 42-year-old desk in Blond, La. I've written blogs read by persons from all over these United States, to Russia, to Australia, to Nigeria, to the Solomon Islands, to Turkey to as far as I know Mars and the outer planets featured in Firefly.

The next time this blog will be read, it will have been written from this 42-year-old desk in Eunice, La. Life will have changed; patterns and flow and such will be different.

But the constant in my life, in all our lives, will be the same then, and forevermore. Jesus, whose DNA sequence has powered these thoughts since they began the day after I retired from the local newspaper (which itself will cease to exist in September), never changes.

We go on, together. Five days a week we the blood of life pouring forth like rain on a deep, dark cloudy day.

In the end, that's about all I have. For...That's Life.

Till Tuesday ...