A Day, Bitter And Cold

Temperatures here in Jacksonville yoyo between 81 degrees last week and 18 degrees Friday morning.

Here is a photo I snapped of one of the fountains in our garden:

Poor cherub can hardly toot his horn because of the ice.

Don’t let the Chamber of Commerce know I posted this photo. The Chamber lures unsuspecting yankee tourists here with lying tales of warm Florida winters.

Notice if you will, that my middle daughter Eve and her husband Mark sailed for the Bahamas on a cruise ship yesterday. They’re off to where it’s warm. They’re getting out while the getting’s good. What is it they say that deserts a freezing ship?

Not only was yesterday cold, it also proved bitter for me.

I suffered a great disappointment that leaves me discouraged.

Same thing happened twice before: once back in the mid 1980s; and once back in 1996. Both those occasions embittered me. I wallowed in despair and self-pity.

But by now, I’d have thought my skin had thickened too much to be wounded the same way again. I was confident that the same thing would never happen again. And even if it did, I believed that I’d matured enough as a Christian that I’d be immune to such bitterness if the same thing ever did happen again.

It did.

Yesterday.

And I find I’m not immune to wounds and bitterness at all.

Oh well, I’ll live.

A verse of Scripture comes to my mind:

Writing to folks he described as “wearied and faint in your minds”, the Bible writer says, “Ye have not yet resisted unto blood”.

Now, isn’t that comforting!

However, on the up side, Friday I published my 2008 diary with Bluefish Books under the title of A Dirty Old Man Sinks Lower. It is the fourth book in my Dirty Old Man Goes Bad series.

As always, I feel uneasy about publishing such a diary for people to read over my shoulder. I always feel ashamed of my writing whenever I publish anything. I fear that readers will spot my mistakes, see me for what I am, and denounce me as a Christian fraud—and as a lousy writer.

Being transparent is traumatic.

So I hesitate and feel reluctant to promote any of my own books.

However, as my newspaper columnist friend the late Poke McHenry once told me:

He that tooteth not his own horn,
The same getteth not tooted.

Yes, but like our fountain cherub, I freeze up.

Which reminds me again, please do not let the Chamber of Commerce know that I’m the one who posted that photo of a frozen fountain in Florida on the internet.

Were the Chamber to know the photo’s source, they’d dispatch the Chamber Hit Squad to dispatch me.