JOHNNY DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS.

Saturday morning Ginny and I dabbled in our garden clearing a flower bed beneath our bedroom window. This was such a relaxed happy activity.

The day went downhill from there.

She had some old books to trade in so we drove to the largest used bookstore in Jacksonville, a place which covers most of a city block in two buildings which house over a million volumes. My heart sinks every time I go in there and I see all those books which other people have written and I realize that the books I write are just so much useless trash, just another item on the dusty pile.

All those dead writers thought they were doing something important too…

Solomon said, “Of the making of many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh”.

About 9 o’clock this evening my brother called from downstate. He informed me that somebody with nothing better to do has organized a family reunion at a state park next month.

He wants me to come be ridiculed and put down and displayed as a failure in front of all these people who would not have even known about it if I’d died ten or fifteen years ago.

My heart sank at the news.

I do not want to go.

These people dismissed me and my immediate family from contact back when my mother died. I see no reason to renew contact.

These folks are related to me but they mean no more to me, nor I to them, than the crowd I encounter at the grocery store checkout line. Yet some sense of guilt or hint of obligations makes me think I perhaps should attend this function.

Of all the things Jesus ever said, the hardest for me to deal with was when he told some poor bastard, “Go home to your family and friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee”.

That was said to the crazy guy who lived in the cemetery and cut himself with sharp stones and Jesus cast the demons into the herd of pigs which jumped off the cliff. Then “He that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him”.

But instead, Jesus sent him to family.

Seems to me that Jesus did that with a couple of blind guys and lepers too.

Instead of letting them be disciples and get burned at the stake or fed to lions, Jesus sent them back to family.

How cruel.

How could a loving God do such a thing?

I’m going to have to pray about this invitation and see if there’s any possible loophole that will get me out of going.

I wrote about my feelings in this same sort of situation back on February 28^th.

For some reason school teacher used to write on my report cards:

Johnny does not play well with others.