Two Voices From The Blue

Over the weekend Ginny and I joined other volunteers from our MED Neighborhood Crime Watch group and hundreds of other volunteers from Jacksonville’s Green It Up/Clean It Up Division in their 13^th annual river Spring cleaning project.

That means we chopped weeds and picked up trash along our Adopt A Road stretch of Willow Branch Avenue.

For our efforts we each got a tee shirt with the River Celebration logo:

That's a picture of an otter, not one of our celebrated river rats (which are much larger).

I continued painting our house and fretting that I’m not getting any writing done.

Last night Ginny said that if I really wanted to write, I’d be writing.

She’s right.

That’s discouraging and I got to sulking about how my writing has no value.

What a downer.

Now, years ago I wrote a profile of St. Patrick of Ireland; it’s a chapter in my book Strangers On The Earth. And at 4 this morning when I turned on my computer to start work, I received the following e-mail:

Dear John,

About 28 years ago, you wrote a great short story on St. Patrick in HIS magazine (IVP). And that article so fascinated me, that I wrote you and asked you if you would mind if I photocopied it and sent it to family, friends, fiends and even the local newspaper and you sent me a nice note saying something to the effect that you were flattered that anyone would care. Anyhow, I continue to send it out to my family, friends and have substituted fiends for neighbors.

In my early days, I went to St. Patrick’s grade school and church and was an altar boy for the priests and bishop when he was in town (Walla Walla-if you can believe that). And during those 16 years, I (and everyone around me) was completely uninformed about St. Patrick even tho we had lots of statues of him, said prayers to him and even my Uncle was named Patrick…and the whole bunch of us were clueless as to who he was.

It has not been since becoming a “protest-ant”, that I learned from your article and others, what a godly, focused, grateful, caring, in-your-face, kind of guy he was. So again, thanks.

So Friday, I was trying to send my son , Colin … a copy of your story and I got fouled up on the transfer of files. My daughter, Shannon, found your website and I have been cruising through it… And I am looking forward to hearing from you and reading some of your other works.

Thanks again for bringing St. Patrick out of obscurity … and for bringing joy to many others. I have given the article to bartenders, saints, sinners, relatives, Greeks, Jews, even Catholics. And of course, I still enjoy the looks on the Irish faces when I tell them….he was English.. Ha, what irony God bestows on us..

Just about every year for the last 25+ years, our tradition on St. Paddy’s Day is to cook up some potatoes in some fashion, maybe have corn beef and cabbage (tho the origins of all that is dubious) and read your article to family and friends gathered around the table. Thanks for being part of our family and our history.

Have a memorable St. Patrick’s Day…… and may we participate in getting the “Good News” out to our “pagan Picts” compelled in love, just like Patrick.

Mike

That e-mail certainly gave me a lift.

From 28 years ago!

Maybe when I finish painting the house in another two or three days, I’ll find spirit, energy and time to start writing again.

My history of the Jacksonville Fire Department still simmers on the back burner awaiting my attention. But at the moment, I’m spending as much time on top of a ladder as any fireman in Jacksonville!

Yes, instead of going to church, I spent Palm Sunday painting.

Is painting a sin?

Must be.

The only place in the Bible I recall anyone painting anything was when Jesus compared some hypocrites to sepulchres which had been whitewashed outside but inside were filled with rot.

Jesus never whitewashed anything.

That reminds me of a joke:

Wayne was a painter, a sly one. He discovered that he can stretch his water-based latex paint and make it go farther by thinning it with more water.

And he thinned his paint a lot.

One day he got a contract from a little country church to paint their white clapboard building. So he got out his scaffolding and began painting, adding water to the paint again and again.

As he neared the end of the job, there came a horrendous clap of thunder, the sky opened and rain poured down.

It washed the thinned paint from the church walls.

The thinned useless paint ran down the walls and puddled on the ground.

Conviction of sin overcame Wayne.

He fell to his knees and cried out: "Dear God, forgive me! What should I do?"

From the thunder, a voice rang out: "Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!"