It is 12:08 PM Wednesday afternoon in the flow of existence. It is 10 degrees here in Holland, Mich.. America is frozen. America has a hard heart towards God.

I am down in our basement writing on my lap top. It is cold. I will turn on a space heater to keep my old bones warm.

Carol left this morning to visit her mother and to do errands.

I went downtown to pick up a CD order and to get a mocha. I suppose in some ways the party has not completely ended.

I got out of bed around 7 o’clock AM this morning. Carol got up this morning at 3:45 AM. She cooked all night.

When I got up this morning I drank coffee and sat in the dark trying to wake up to a new day. Some days it is almost impossible to keep my eyes open to the Light. I messed with the computer this morning, wandered the house and read ”Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings” [The Classics of Western Spirituality] and ”Maximus The Confessor” by Andrew Louth.

BREAK

It is now 12:31 PM I had to stop writing my personal story to help Carol shovel snow off our driveway. Carol and I are a team.

So where was I when I stopped to help my wife? I do not remember right now.

Here is some sweet stuff from St. Maximus the Confessor to chew on while america sinks under a massive weight of national debt—

”12. Contemplation of Elijah’s vision at Horeb

So Elijah is shown to be most wise after the fire and the earthquake and the wind that rent the mountains, which I take to be zeal, and discernment, and an eager, assured faith. For discernment utterly alters the ingrained habit of evil, assaulting it through virtue, like an earthquake breaking up what is held together. And zeal, burning like fire, enkindles those who have it to persuade the wicked by the warmth of the spirit.

And faith, in the form of a compelling wind, forces the insensible to purification for the sake of God’s glory through demonstration of the most lasting miracles and gives the truly faithful man guidance through hidden water and deifying fire. By it the famine of ignorance is cured, and those who sacrifice to God by custom are kindly dealt with. By it the teachers of evil-the trains of thought and the demons of sophistry-are put to death, and those under the slavery of the passions set free. After all these, by the gentle breeze, the voice in which God existed, Elijah was secretly taught that state of being, beyond any speech or demonstration, which is, by the utterance of reason and by forms of life and conduct, divine, untroubled, peaceful, completely immaterial, simple and free from every shape or form.

Therefore, wondering at its glory and wounded by its beauty, he longs to emulate it rather than just pursue it, that is to fight for truth’s sake everything that is opposed to it, and judges it much more honorable to see or know nothing that is opposed to the only God who is wholly through all and in all. While still in the flesh, he is preserved in that state, passing through matter by the divine chariot of the virtues, treating it as a veil through which the mind finds a pure passage to the intelligible realm, and finding the flesh [simply] a cloud, darkening through its passions the pilot of the soul, so that he might become a partaker of those ineffable things that he desires, so far as that is possible to one still bound to flesh subject to corruption, and become a firm assurance for us of those things that are promised. For through all these things that with a secret meaning were wordlessly enacted, God cries out, setting this before him, that to be with God alone in peace is more profitable that any other good.” pg. 106, 107 St. Maximus the Confessor DIFFICULTY 10

It is going on 1 o’clock PM Wednesday afternoon. I am still down in our open basement writing down my thought listening to sludge metal wondering what to write or do next to keep myself in the land of the living.

I will close to wait on the Lord.

music: Ascend ”Ample Fire Within”