Time to Begin Again...

Yeah, I know...it has been four months since my last blog post. My friends Milton and Jack have nudged me gently, but the stuff of life kinda got in the way of me writing about the stuff of life. My life is good...much better than I deserve, but there are some things that need a reboot, a new beginning to move to the great next. Twenty five years or so ago a friend of mine, Kenny Wood wrote a lyric for a song...the lyric was initially rejected by execs at Word records. Here's the part they didn't like..."It's time to begin again, let yourself go, stop your holding on. Sometimes you just can't win. That's when you know love will carry you and never let you go." The reason the execs gave for removing it from the record list was... "Christians don't want to hear, 'sometimes you just can't win'". Thankfully Billy Crockett insisted on including it on his record and he and Kenny prevailed, because it is a reality...occasionally we all need a do-over. As it turns out Kenny is one of us who qualifies as well, and after a number of years of battling back from some very difficult times, he has begun writing again. That's a good thing. He has a blog called The Woodman and I wanted to repost his writing from today.

Backlash

A father took his son fishing off an old pier. They stood 10 feet apart with a red cooler between them. They didn’t talk, they fished.

The boy made his first cast hoping his father was watching. Lucky for him he wasn’t because something went wrong. Maybe he was trying to cast too far out, but for whatever reason he ended up with a nasty backlash. The line looked like a bird’s nest had exploded.

It was his father’s reel, handed down like an heirloom, like an old watch, from his father. The boy had begged to use it. Now look at it. One cast. He turned his back and tried to untangle it. He couldn’t have done it even if he had fingernails. He was afraid the reel was a goner.

His father finally turned and noticed his son wasn’t fishing. He saw him bending over, working on the reel. He knew what was wrong without asking.

“Let me see the old girl,” he said. The feel of it took him back to his own boyhood, to the same pier and to Saturdays like this one---his father’s arms behind and around him, big hands over smaller hands, casting sidearm, practicing.

He worked at untangling the line but it was hopeless.

“I knew this day would come,” he told his boy.

He sat down on the edge of the pier, opened the tackle box, pulled out a new reel still in the package, unscrewed the old reel, wrapped it in his handkerchief and laid it down in the box like a loved one. Then, he mounted the new reel onto the rod, handed it to his son and said, “Now you are ready to do some fishing with your own rig.”

Backlash. There’s no way around it. And it’s easy to get the idea from well-meaning doctors and friends that we are supposed to trace the mess back to the beginning, find the root cause and untangle our knots. But sometimes all we can do is hand it over to someone who recognizes what is beyond repair and needs to be laid to rest. Often it’s the very thing that stands in the way of beginning again.

I encourage you to read Kenny's other stuff as well. Maybe it is time for you to begin again...let go...let go of your attachment to winning...and know that Love will catch you and never let you go.

Pling, Pling...

dg