a true happiness

I appear to have just had an unplanned blog holiday. Oops. I lost my voice for a while and the strain of whisper shouting at the children exhausted all my mental faculties. It is at just the right time, then, that I got the all clear to delight you with some news.

Many of you have been asking over and over the many long years

When is your mother going to blog?

and

When is your mother going to write a book?

Well, the first nagging question has been brought to a cheerful and happy conclusion. Finally! Finally my mother, Joyce Carlson, is devotedly blogging at her new sight Asking for the Road and there is even some talk of my father, Robert Carlson, will be applying his own ready fingers to the keyboard. Those of you who know anything about anything know that my parents write splendidly. If you like to read at all, then you are always longing for their next letter. If you have met them in person, you are constantly exasperated by the intervals in between updates. Blogging, I am assured, will alleviate this sorrow and force my mom, in particular, to WRITE WRITE WRITE which may eventually lead to that long hopped for book.

Here is a mere taste to cause you to go NOW to her site and BOOKMARK IT and go there every day!

It seems to me after a weekend of mountain chasing, that looking for Kilimanjaro—and hoping to actually SEE it as a whole—is rather like looking for God. “I don’t see any mountain,” I say petulantly to anyone who will listen. “It’s over there,” they say, waving vaguely in a southwesterly direction. “Where?” “There.” So I stare and stare, and gradually pick out a pale blue, never-changing smear of color stretching low across the horizon, rising ever so slightly to meet an ever-changing wall of clouds. And now and then I fool myself into believing that something enormous and dark lies hidden behind the puffy white clouds... Most of the time when I’m looking for God (or mountains), I underestimate the size of things. I keep looking for something small and particular somewhere near the edge of the horizon—something comfortably about my size. And not looking high enough, I miss the essential truth that “the world is crowded with God”. C. S. Lewis says, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”[2] Stealthily he comes. “Clouds and thick darkness surround him.”[3] Then imperceptibly the clouds roll away, and I’m left open-mouthed, eyes shining , glad beyond glad to catch a glimpse of such magnificence, until the time when, unaccountably to me, God withdraws again into darkness, “making the clouds his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind”[4]. It’s not like God doesn’t ever come down into the tiny, particular cry of a baby, or speak in a nearly silent whisper from the back of a cave, but that’s another story. For the time being, I’m trying to remember to get my eyes off the ground and look up.