Christian Living
Larry Lilly's Letter Tuesday February 10, 2009
I am one of those would be writers who plan on telling my life story, someday, most likely in the form of a novel, this vehicle to be used in the hopes of sparing many early contemporaries the ignominy of leaving this life in stripes.
I have and still refer to my early life as Golden Days of Dysfunction and when I do this the Great Blonde assures me the authorities would have been delirious with joy had my family attained such rarified heights. I have spent the larger part of my adult life running from the memory of this reality. And yet, and yet…to borrow Wiesel's phrase, I discovered the other day that I was identifying with the life journey explanation of T.S. Eliot when he wrote:
"And the end of all exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
I am on record as spending more than a few years utterly hating my mother and a deep simmering resentment of my stepfather, (Mr. Lilly who in my first 18 years I believed to be my biological father) for dying when I was six and leaving me with "her."
Through years of walking with the Lord, and learning from the studious walk, it dawned on me one day, that all of the searching, fuming, excuse making was folly and thus I learned the necessity of accepting the truth of scripture, especially, Romans 8:28 which states emphatically:
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."
The truth being that I must find the key to my early life through this verse and others like it. Thus near the end of my searching for the meaning of the pain, I found myself back where I started and recognized the before unseen beauty of the tortured lives of those closest to me. When this happened I realized that rather than cursing the people of my life, I could wonder how on earth they ever made the next step, how or why they found the courage to even get out of bed and face the day. This epiphany ran the gauntlet from initial pity all the way up the scale to outright admiration for what they overcame to just simply live. In reading stories like Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath, I saw my family and my neighborhood portrayed on the canvas of my mind as the perennial stationary migrants who just never could get it together, and figuring out who we would be today, the Joads, or often, more pathetic specimens of the race.
So when my journey to places and people of my youth came full circle, I then grasped the meaning of Eliot's line. I know the place for the first time, for I now see it through the eyes of experience and understanding that all lives in some respects are at the same time pitiful and magnificent. And Christ blends them together for His higher purpose.
Larry Lilly Copyright © 2009 Use with credit.
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