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It is Hell being Warm!

I don't believe the world is going to end because the Mayans ran out of space to carve on a flat rock.

 I don't believe that when it ends, as T. S. Eliot described it, that there will remain only a thousand lost golf balls and an asphalt road.  (That isn't exactly what he said, but it is close enough, and it may not have been T. S. Eliot who said it, either.  I do not live in a fact-based reality.)  

 I am not the least worried that the world will end soon, or that when it does, or I do, that I will be sent to spend the rest of eternity in a hot place.  I know that there are those of you--unbelievers, every one of you--who think that Tucson is hell on wheels in the summer, but you have never been to a swap meet in Yuma, have you?. 

 No, my fearlessness in the face of doom, destruction, and deserved torture at the hands of a good and loving god is not based on the threats of hot places at all.  As Mark Twain said, it is with the serenity of a bishop holding four aces that I face both the stone calendars of the Mayans and the stone-cold hearts of over-heated preachers.  I have been to the Promised Land and it snows there! 

 The Good Lord did cast me into the jaws of the University of Chicago, once ago, and I have seen the ruts that God and the Snow Plow Drivers of the Windy City can create with frozen slop in an alley on the shore of Lake Michigan.  They can carve somewhat parallel canyons not-quite the same width as car tracks that will remain rock-hard all winter and deliver drivers to places they had never heard of, before or since.  

 I have been thrust into the furrowed, glacier-forgotten hills of Northeast Iowa to teach things only God and a Lutheran Pastor could know for certain, where I learned life skills at the handles of both show shovels and snow blowers.  I have walked in the footsteps of Seventeenth Century theologians, and seen their handiwork!  I know that truth is hard, and white, and colder than a witch's . . . heart.  

 And then, after having circled around to Tucson for the second or third time, after hearing the siren call that every believing child of Scandinavian ancestry knows for certain and for sure, we moved to Israel in a New Place, to Minnesota, where manna is lefse, and where milk and honey are more easily ice cream and something on a stick at the State Fair.  

 Sture sent us a picture of what a big strong Swede looks like on a snow blower; once our snow blower, as green as a Deere in a field of ice cream.  He did it to remind us that there are Let's Pretend Saints who cannot take the cold; who cannot take glory when they have it, but who know their infernal destiny is heat:  summer heat in Tucson, and a Mayan calendar that mysteriously ends where the Mayan ran out of rock.  

 I understand that Sture thinks that he and John Deere are simply clearing off the icing over Promised Eternal Rest, and that he believes that the sun will coax the tulips up to glory, again, but he is blowing crystals at the moon.  

 I have seen the Promised Land, and it is colder than a cob!  And if you don't know what that means, you have never been to the Promised Land in January.  

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