OK

We left the small town west of Canby, a place where its main street contains a flooring store, a gas station, a small grocery, and about a dozen antique stores. Its side streets are lined with houses stretching back more than a century.

Brenda had come out of her AA meeting cheerful, bearing a slice of cake for me. I had climbed up from the church basement, as sorry for myself as a stuffed donkey from a book by A. A. Milne.

The Al Anon meeting (headquarters based in your home town, J.H!) is a rather new experience for me(third meeting, thanks P.D’.). There were only six of us, and a rather interesting mix.

I drove the four or five miles toward home.

My mood was infectious, Brenda lost her cheerfulness.

I began thinking, once again, about my situation. I thought about how I don’t trust my wife, wondered if she has kept her part of our bargain. I thought about my children, what it would be like for them if I divorced their mother. I thought about God, how I have felt Him near and been unable to make my wife understand He is love.

Somewhere between the Pudding River and the Barlow House (residence of the man who built the toll road over the cascade mountains for the Oregon Trail) a drizzle misted up the windshield, enough to turn on the wipers. And just as I passed the Vietnam Medical helicopter perched on its strange pedestal at the edge of town I suddenly felt, irrationally, it would all be OK.

I’ve been thinking about that feeling all day today. It was oddly peaceful. It seemed for a while there that it didn’t matter if my marriage survives or not. I felt like I would be OK.

Still, the feeling didn’t prevent another fitful night, perhaps five hours of sleep... nightmares.

My point...

Not sure I have one.

Or I have too many.

I’ve been thinking I am tired of the melodrama this blog has been. I’ve been thinking I will come out the other side of this experience different than I went in. Probably a little more mature, maybe even a little wiser. I’ve been thinking that Father God isn’t anything like my earthly father.

Sometimes some pretty rotten things happen in life. My earthly father has been a part of some of them. My heavenly Father has been a part of all of them. But my heavenly Father hasn’t taught me things by throwing me into harm’s way and yelling at me if I failed.

Sometimes it feels like I have been thrown into harm’s way. But unlike my wife, I don’t think God has done it.

I think that much of it has come from my own choices, and by choices of others, and some from living in a strange universe with strange physical laws and the requirement that my spirit be housed in mortality.

But instead of an angry shout about how I am incompetantly operating a piece of equipment, or failing some other test of manliness, He whispers that it is going to be OK.