Well, friends, I think I may have found pants that will help stop the chafing. I’m having them shipped in by 2nd day air, which means I’ll probably have them Thursday. I’ll try them out when they arrive.
My hips are healing, too. For the first time in quite a while, I was able to shower this morning without feeling pain where the water hit. I’m hoping those hips will be sufficiently mended for me to start out again on Sunday. We’ll see.
And at the same time — once again — things are happening to make me feel scared of what I’m about to do.
There’s a tremendous storm approaching Omaha this night: wind gusts of sixty miles an hour and up, hail and violent ground lightning. They’ve warned people to seek shelter and stay away from windows and doors. The storm will pass over Red Haw State Park, where I’d have been camping in Iowa tonight, a few hours after it passes over me. I wonder how my little light-weight tent would have fared.
I’m having some sobering thoughts here regarding how very vulnerable we naked apes really are in this natural world. Is this just me? I think: We cling to our technologies, even though they are destroying the planet and may eventually destroy us, because deep down we know how naked and vulnerable we are. We cling to our technologies for the same reason I’m once more feeling a bit fearful of going out on the road.
There’s stuff in the Old Testament about this. The prophets pondered the way that people look to weapons and strong tools for safety, and on the ways in which such things can let them down. “Judah has built fortified cities everywhere,” said Hosea (8:14), “but I’ll send fire to his cities, and it will destroy his citadels.” “Woe to those who rely on cavalry,” said Isaiah (31:1), “and trust in the numbers of their chariots, and the strength of their horsemen, instead of trusting in the Holy One of Israel”.
If you build upon anything or have confidence in anything which stands in time and is on this side eternity and [the] Being of beings, your foundation will be swept away, and night will come upon you…. (Francis Howgill, A Lamentation for the Scattered Tribes…, 1656)
And yet that is what we do, too, just as the Israelites did. We rely on the strength of our homes, and the speed of our cars rushing to our homes, to protect us from storms like this. Now, will God send his fire to take these things down, too? I am pondering greenhouse warming, the global fire of this time. This storm bearing down on Omaha is undoubtedly powered by a little extra heat energy because the greenhouse gas blanket has already thickened. As the blanket thickens further, future storms will have more energy powering them. They’ll become more violent, more destructive.
I shall be leaving safety, once again, to go into a world I see as just beginning to come apart all over — a world in which safety, everywhere, is coming to an end. That is the burden of environmental witness as I understand it. I am called to bear witness against the idolatry of strong tools, but to do so by myself laying down those tools — and feeling consequently vulnerable.
O God, my Rock and my Salvation — help me stand straight!
