He has this

It's time to stop moping and get on with it, I say through clinched, tired teeth.

Last night I got to do something one rarely gets to do. I got to turn back time. My wife, Mary, and I watched baseball practice on one field and baseball tryouts on another -- at the same time, from the same set of bleachers.

On one field, 11-year-old Gabe was clearly the fastest player on his travel team that will begin playing Friday night somewhere in Jefferson Parish. He's also the smallest, but watching him fly around the bases, touching only the corner of the bags while never breaking stride was like watching his mom do the same in softball 20 plus years ago.

On the other field, 8-year-old Gavin was being goofy Gavin. He was at tryouts, but to him it was just fun -- the way the game should be and never is after about 10. Long hair flying in the wind or flying down his face while he was attempting to bat. Smiles were as evident as caught balls.

The two will soon be playing at different playgrounds. I pray not at the same time. We were called in Wednesday night because our eldest daughter, Shanna, has to work late on Wednesdays.

While there, our youngest daughter called, freaking out because she had dropped some clothes from a top shelf that landed on the head of her daughter's cat. The cat didn't move at first, then got up favoring a paw. Things are good now, but the scare registered somewhere on the scale of a 10 on the Richter Scale.

We will be missing this. We will soon be more than five hours away from them. They will have to make do without us, which I have no doubt they can. But ...

It's been hard to imagine.

Where do I go when things are hard to imagine?

Straight to the scriptures. Really. I do. Can't get along without them. My humanity screams into a boiling sky that this is hard. My search for divinity tells me he has this.

I was queasy when we moved from Jackson, Miss., to New Orleans in 1991. It worked out.
I was queasy when we moved from New Orleans to Lacombe in 2006.
Queasy when we moved to Covington in 2010.
Queasy when we moved to Eunice in 2012.
Assured and happy when we moved to back New Orleans last year, because I was so very sure this church plant thing would be my last appointment. I really did.
I'm queasy again, because the unknown is staring at us again. I pray readers in Coushatta will understand that. It's my humanity calling out, again.

But the scriptures tell me this:
(Jesus talking) "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than cloths? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?" But...but...but...

No buts, ifs, ands, look backs. Life lived in peace must be life lived in the present. Can't live it in the future because it isn't decided. Can't live it in the past for there is nothing we can do about it. Today, well, that's all we have.

And today I choose to be happy, relatively happy, and understand that there but for the grace of God go I. This is the last time I will write about this. The journey continues.

Look, I could have died 20 years ago. I could have never seen these crazy grand children do their thing in the back seat of a car (discussing nations of the world, Gavin said of Mexico, "I hear they make good tacos). I could never have known the love of a sensational woman. I could have missed life with the Lord entirely.

But through it all, he says, "Peace, be still," and the storm dissipates.  He has this. He always has this.

It is enough, is it not? If nothing else, we're never boring.