A blog about Personal Journals.
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So often I find myself in the position of that grieving father in the Bible pleading with Jesus to heal his son, and told he only had to believe crying out “I believe Lord; help my unbelief!” But when doubts and fears assail and threaten to overwhelm me I’m reminded in the words of that good old song many of us know so well: “Where could I go but to the Lord.” So despite the enemy of the children of God, “the Accuser” and his demons that plague me attacking relentlessly so often, when in the pit of despair and plodding through Pilgrim’s “Slough of Despond,” the fact is ever before me: Where can I go but to the Lord. My biggest problem in dealing with depression and despair many times is that I have given Satan abundant cause for accusing me of my manifold sins; they are ever before me. So it is that I need continued reminding that love covers a multitude of sins, that my loved ones and friends gone on before shared that love of God for me and will welcome me home in that love when it is time to cast off this earthly shell. But “Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”? It becomes a question when love exacts a bitter price such as the psychosis of grief that comes with the loss of those you love deeply, the loss of my daughters Diana and Karen, my grandson Justin, the grief and the nightmares never depart in such cases. They can beat at you with continued regret over the sins of both omission and commission, why you couldn’t have done better as a father or mother when it comes to the loss of children. While such loss may make you a more compassionate person, it can also cause you to grow bitter and callous, to go into a self-preservation mode against ever loving someone again. However, if the Spirit of God indwells you as a child of God it isn’t really a choice of whether to love again; you are compelled to continue to love others, to unknowingly bless someone with a kind word or only a smile; it’s the little song “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” and you don’t make such a choice; as the saying goes it “comes with the territory” if you really are a child of God and born of His love. And if Satan causes our hearts to condemn us we must counter our Adversary as Jesus did in The Temptation with the words of Scripture, in this case: “God is greater than our hearts.” We read in the Bible that Jesus came as a saving light into a world plunged in darkness; but the soft glow of a coal oil lamp seen through a cabin window can save a life. I was reminded of this story related in my book “The Lord and The Weedpatcher” just the other night as I sat alone in the dark outside in front of the hospital looking toward the mountains where we lived on the mining claim in Boulder Gulch here in the Kern River Valley. As my eyes moved from the top of Split Mountain toward the direction of the old claim the darkness was nearly total in the forested area I have known since childhood and it startled me for a moment, to recall our living in such forest darkness without any utilities or neighbors and those coal oil lamps for light. As construction for the dam was going on, road construction ran ahead of it and the new section of roadway from below the dam going toward Kernville bisected Boulder Gulch and Hungry Gulch both of which are now campgrounds and was only about 200 yards from our cabin. It had been interesting to watch the activity of so much work going on here in the Valley; there had been little of such work until the construction for the dam began.
It was nearly bedtime and just before blowing out the lamps there was a knock at the door. When Grandad opened the door there was a boy about ten and a man about thirty standing before us; their clothes were torn and splattered with blood, but neither had any really severe injuries.
The man hurriedly explained in a rush of words that they had gotten on the new stretch of road and were on their way back to Bakersfield after a fishing trip. How they got on the road since it had not been officially opened for traffic I never learned, but as they drove by in the pitch darkness they saw the faint glow of one of our lamps shining through a window. They were travelling at a fast pace in a nearly new Ford, but when they rounded the curve at French Gulch there was no bridge! And they went sailing off the end of the road crashing into the large granite boulders lining the sides of the very steep gulch as the car rolled over several times before coming to rest at the bottom of the chasm.
While the boy and the man appearing at our door were able to get out of the car and head back up the road toward the place they had seen the faint glow of light from our window, the only sign of life in the darkness for some miles, another man was trapped in the wreck and had suffered severe injuries. Despite his own injuries the man that came to our door was able to assist Grandad in getting the other man out of the wrecked car. Grandad then took all three to the doctor in Kernville and the badly injured man survived though he came very close to dying. Had the boy and man been forced to walk all the way back to Kernville the injured man trapped in the car would most certainly have died. The following day with the grit and determination of a true mountain man youth, I was able to retrieve the blood-spattered front seat from the mangled Ford and used it to replace the badly worn one in my old ’36 Plymouth.
Beacons of light on ships and aircraft have prevented many a potential disaster, we know the purpose of lighthouses and even a single candle has been known to have been used to such an effect. The stories are legion of a candle in the window lit with the hope of guiding a lost loved one home, of votive candles used to express love and honor, even to comfort ourselves by doing such things; in the true story I have told the glow of a coal oil lamp saved a man’s life.
“This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine…” Many of us are familiar with the lilting little song. Such light of God shines in the kind words and deeds towards others. You can well imagine the horror of driving on a road in pitch darkness when coming around a curve your headlights suddenly shine into a void where there is no more road! Only a dark chasm into which you are doomed to plunge! I believe America and this sorry world is running out of road and headed toward such a chasm. Whether or not, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine.” And so should you. Surrounded by such an abundance of gloom and doom we need all the little lights shining we can get to give us hope.
“There’s always one more thing.” Such is often the case whether it’s packing for a trip or some other task there is often the nagging suspicion we have forgotten something, some “thing” we didn’t do. It became routine over the years for me to ask myself in many instances “What have I forgotten?” We read in the Bible that “With God, all things are possible.” I’m being encouraged by some that it may be possible, with enough help and services to return home! There has been remarkable and surprising improvement in my physical condition and I can now use a wheelchair to go outside the hospital unassisted, and I do so now as many as eight times a day. But if I am able to return to my little cottage in Bodfish, it will be through the love of so many and their prayers for me, the many attending angels including precious loved ones and friends gone on to be with the Lord ahead of me; and perhaps because there is “One more thing,” though I have no idea what this thing may be; perhaps to continue to write in a way as to encourage others?
It is essential, I believe, for us to have something to believe in, to hold on to throughout our lives. For some of us our faith and trust in God is such an anchor of the soul and the Bible our best source of information concerning the nature and works of God and our relationship to Him. I further believe in a hierarchy of the heavenly host, of angels of various kinds. But while as in the “Parable of the Tares” God has sown His seed in love and hope, Satan has sown the seed of evil and we are to distinguish the difference by the love of God in His children.
The definitive treatise on love is I Corinthians 13, sacrificial love without any sense of sacrifice. We read “God is love, and all who love are born of God.” But it is the kind of love described in 1 Corinthians. The children of God do not betray love and trust, but this is characteristic of the children of the Devil. Christians are told they are to be known by their love for one another, but the love of God is not constrained by any religious affiliation; I believe there are loving children of God apart from anything of religion.
As to the sowing of seed, we know it takes the proper soil and care for the seed to reach maturity. And so I believe the children of God grow in the knowledge of God, which means they mature in the matter of love. It took many years for me to learn this and begin to live and write accordingly. So if my writing has encouraged anyone it is due to the many attending angels surrounding me and the lessons of love God and these angels including good friends, angels in their own right have taught me. If I am able to return home and continue writing or to do that one more thing God may yet require of me I believe it will be in answer to the love and prayers of so many for me in cooperation with the work of so many attending angels.
Asking those of you that have read the story already, I’m reposting the following because there seems to be so much animosity in the BC blogs. Things are not going well for America, and there is a need for civilized discourse about the many problems besetting our nation. There may be another revolution brewing when the tyranny of government becomes unendurable, but I want to share once more some of what made us a great nation though God may in fact be in the very process of judging America because of our nation forsaking Him: My generation of WWII and antecedent to TV was not forced to read books. We were born to read, we were readers, and books were a natural and quite normal way of life to us. I was fortunate to be born to a family of avid readers, therefore from earliest memory I was surrounded by and immersed in good books and magazines, an encyclopedia and dictionary, newspapers, learning to read and write not that long out of diapers. And there was radio with a multiplicity of programming; that like good books and before the advent of TV required the constant exercising of ones imagination as well as the intellect.
Among the books of my childhood were the novels not only of those like Scott, Cooper, Clemens and so many others, but those by women as well. One of my favorite woman authors was Geneva Grace Stratton-Porter. She wrote her first novel The Song of the Cardinal in 1903. The next story, Freckles, written 1904 is about an orphan who gets a job as a timber guard in the Limberlost, a forested swamp in Indiana. Freckles has only one hand; however, he falls in love with a young girl, the beautiful “Swamp Angel.” Believing he is impoverished, his mysterious, noble past is finally made known; he is the nephew of “Lord O’More.” The book was made into a film in 1935 followed by a remake in 1960.
A Girl of the Limberlost written in 1911, and also made into film, is about a poor girl, Elnora Comstock, who grows up on the edge of the Limberlost swamp. Her father had died tragically, and when her mother is withdrawn and cold toward her she finds companionship with the Limberlost. There she discovers how Limberlost can teach her in ways no formal education could.
Sharing a like love of nature, Geneva’s life at the Limberlost from which she drew so much of her writing had much in common with that of Henry’s at Walden. In many ways Geneva’s writing prepared me for my life as a boy in the Sequoia National Forest, and for the later friendship and kinship I would find with Henry.
Of all her several novels and writing, Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost stand out most in my mind. There are two incidents about the young forester that remain vividly to me; the first being his coming across a footprint in the forest made by his Swamp Angel. After pressing his lips to her imprint, the young man uses a piece of bark from a tree to carefully cover and protect this precious evidence of “his angel.” The second incident occurs when the young man is abed recovering from wounds received from rescuing the angel. She declares her love for him at this time, and says he shall have her notwithstanding his seeming poverty, his ancestry not then known, and his being crippled.
Elnora was the girl counterpart of me as a boy. Her evident love of nature, her courage and sense of exploration and adventure made us soul mates from the moment I started reading the book. It was not so much Shana of the Jungle with whom I related, but Elnora of the Limberlost. Tom Sawyer had Becky Thatcher; I had Elnora Comstock to whom I wanted to be a hero just like the young forester to his angel.
Life has a cruel way at times making cynics of people. The spreading Marxism and perversion in the universities and Hollywood, substituting the “reality” of TV for good books and the exercising of ones imagination, trading the coarse and profane “literature” of those who obviously could never relate to Scott, Cooper, and Geneva, had they even known of them, our young people were deprived of the very best humankind had to offer by way of civilized thought and manners, cheated and betrayed of the real progress of civilization. As a result the Angel, Elnora, and the young forester have been cheated and betrayed as well, as have I.
Somehow, the sop to women on the part of the committee adding Austen, Cather, Elliot, and Woolf to the Great Books does not go nearly far enough. Honoring the “compatibility of differences” is not seen at the United Nations, nor is it seen in America. Perhaps it can only be seen and understood by those like Elnora, the young forester and his angel, by those who can understand them and enter into the kind of relationship that honors and dignifies the compatibility of differences.
Few today could read either Emerson or Thoreau without yawning or becoming glassy-eyed, few today could read Geneva without thinking her writing altruistic, simplistic, or at the best “quaint.” However, we seek in vain for any marked advance of civilized good manners and morality that has supplanted these works of the past.
I’ve been gone a long time from TBC blog, but I wanted folks to know I was compelled despite being under hospice care to republish a book of mine that has long been out of print.
When I was told an old copy of this early book of mine “The Lord and The Weedpatcher” was found in a used bookstore and the price was nearly $100 I knew it was time to republish the book. I recall the book signing at Russo’s Books years ago and people really liked it, not only for the many stories about the “old days” but especially the old pictures like those of our place in Bakersfield on the corner of Cottonwood and Padre (Little Oklahoma) and of our mining claim here in the Kern River Valley during the early days before the Lake went in.
There are new stories and pictures added in this republication and I hope people will enjoy them. This book along with 23 others I have written can be found at iUniverse.com. Just write Samuel Heath in the search box.
God giving me strength I’ll try to post some new articles here, but I have to take it slow since my eyes along with the body are failing.
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