Friday, December 26, 2008


Pale Horse



When storm clouds rolled in from the North Hassle always lost his nerve to drink. He never lost his nerve to kill. Killing is an exercise of his power over others, while drinking merely sapped his control in an all round fashion. Dark clouds rolling in always made him feel like a helpless dead man with his casket closing over him only able to watch the last remnants of light wink out.

He stumbled in the dark over the step in front of his cottage. Northwest Arkansas gets dark and misty when cool air comes rolling over the mountains from the North. Some folks recently began likening it to the aggression of the Yankees into the South.

Hassle is an evil man. Not born that way, but nurtured evil by despicable parents. He had been named Matthew Dobbs, but shortly after his parents realized they didn’t want children and resented him they began calling him Hassle. They felt it appropriate.

Hassle, when he was twelve, watched his father beat his mother to death one night in a drunken rage. His father cried for days after burying her. When his father quit crying, Hassle shot him early in the morning as he was walking into the barn, ever since Hassle had lived as an evil man.

He wasn’t the flashy kind of evil that ends up on the front page of the paper in some big city back east. Hassle’s evil was like a deep dark pool in a bog with something just under the surface waiting to take any passerby. He mostly waited for people to fall into his evil and then he would take them mercilessly. Perhaps the only other person in these parts of Arkansas more evil than Hassle is his wife Matti.

Hassle entered his cottage on the edge of town and took off his boots. As he entered the small parlor to the left of the front door he looked up to see his wife sitting upright in her rocker stone dead with a gaping hole in her chest and pieces of her heart on the wall and floor behind her. Her knitting lay in her lap with her hands still clutching the needles.

She gazed at him with glazed eyes and a shocked but mocking sort of smile, the sort of smile that always creeped into her mouth when she foresaw his folly before it happened to him. To her right, sitting in his chair, is a young man named Craig Patterson dressed in Confederate grays loosely holding a carbine. Hassle looked at his wife one more time in contempt.

You bitch.

As if reading his thoughts Craig briefly glanced over at the woman he had shot two hours ago and then leveled his gaze back on Hassle. Hassle sighed deeply and leaned against the doorway.

“You fightin for the Confederacy huh?”

“Yes sir, riding in the cavalry till couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh yeah, did ya lose your nerve an run off? Come to get your due while all the fighin’s goin on?”

“No sir, not at all.”

Hassle studied his face again trying to recognize him.

“We met before?”

“No.”

“I cause you some kinda trouble?”

“No.”

“Then what the hell are you doin in my house?”

“I came for the reckoning.”

Hassle thought this over for a moment.

“If your trouble’s with my wife you done blown her heart out already. An if all’s well for you, well, you can just walk on outa here if you want.” Wouldn’t that just kill her if she wasn’t already dead. For her to think she saw his imminent death only to have the reaper walk out the door in front of her cold dead body with him watchin the whole thing.

“No, sir, it’s not just your wife I came for you too.”

“Well shit son what the hell you waitin for I’m standin right here.”

“Your days are up, but you still got some words left so I’ll just let you say whatever you need to till you run out.”

“What you mean like confession or somethin?” Hassle was getting annoyed at this point.

“Somethin like that.”

Hassle thought for a long time. He had always wondered what he’d think about when his time came, now it was here all he could think about was how ugly his life had been.

“Well, I don’t suppose its much use for me huh? I magine I done used up Jesus’s mercy and worked him right into a spittin rage huh?”

Craig pursed his lips in thought for a moment.

“I don’t suppose it ever really runs out.”

Hassle looked around the room at all the things his lying and stealing had gotten him. None seemed so valuable anymore, not that he ever really enjoyed things anyway. He just liked stealing and killing.

“What are you talking about a reckoning? Are you with the law?”

“You could say that. I was in a special cavalry dispatch in the army. We were crossing into the union and raiding their supply lines and trying to kill officers in their camps. One night it got real hot and everything went to chaos. I sprang upon a union officer. I took him off his horse and he hit the ground laughing. I was so shocked to hear anyone laughing in the middle of a gunfight I just stared at him stunned like. He looked at me and said, ‘Son, you’re the only man to ever touch me an live.’ He just kept laughing real loud slapping the ground on his hands and knees. He said ‘Hell, you took me clean off my horse. I’m sorry, you don’t understand do you? I’m death son. You just knocked death off his pale horse!” He laughed and laughed at that. I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. Somehow I just knew he wasn’t lyin. This whole time bullets are flying all around us and he’s just laughin, watchin me waitin to see what I do. Then He finally stops laughing and says ‘Well what are you gonna do now that you’ve wrestled death off his horse?’

I thought about it for a moment, and then I said “Well if I can’t kill you…

‘No you can’t do that’

Well if I can’t kill you I’m gonna at least take your horse and your guns.

‘Alright, you can take them. But I’m telling you that horse is on a mission, a reckoning until the apocalypse. If you ride him, you’re on his mission.’

Then I was really shocked. You see this wasn’t just death’s horse, this was the pale horse form the apocalypse, straight out of revelations. I said,

Alright, how do I do that?

He said, ‘Well son, you’ll need one of my eyes in order to recognize the harvest.’
Then quick as a bullet he sprung up and tackled me. He held me down and ripped out my right eye, my shootin eye, and then ripped out one of his and put his eye where my eye used to be. I screamed out in terrible pain but before I knew it, it was over and I could see, only different than before.

He was still on top of me smiling with one of his eyes missing and dripping blood all on my coat. He let me up and said, ‘Well, you better be on your way. There is a great harvest and now you are the sole sower.’

Then I got on that pale horse and started ridin. Ended up here. I knew when I saw you and your wife I’s gonna rid the earth of yalls wicked ways.”
Hassle had spent his life being unimpressed by the things he encountered but this story profoundly struck him.

“You know, I’ve never much liked this life, and its never really…”

The sound of the carbine firing cut Hassle’s words off abruptly. Hassles fell back into the hall way against the wall clutching his chest gasping for air. He couldn’t yell, and didn’t really want to anyway. He slid to the floor and fell over as Craig rose from the chair and walked into the hallway to stand over him.

“Your words were up Hassle.”

Craig pointed the carbine at Hassle’s head.

“Now your time is up too.”

Friday, December 05, 2008

Spilled Out

This spilled out after a group meeting some time ago. I happened upon it today. I tried explaining this one night but didn’t feel satisfied at my own efforts to illustrate what was going on in my soul. I wrote this hoping to clear it up. I think I meant to bring it back up the next week but never got to it. I came across it today and rehashed it.

The desert, and my time there, visits me constantly. A theme that seems to walk hand and hand with my time there is the desert’s apparent indifference to my presence there. What’s strange is I found the indifference comforting and peaceful. It didn’t need me there, yet my presence made the desert that day unique.

Also, being such a desolate place the presence of life may only be described as hopeful. Hopeful everyday for sustenance.

However the world I live in daily is devoid of much hope. There is too much sustenance readily available. So what do we do with ourselves in light of such “provision”. The world tells us to make more of ourselves so that we could make the world better for more people. We owe it to everyone who longs for our blessings to make the most of ourselves. Most of what meets my eye and ear everyday is focused on me. It’s a hopelessness that is constantly calling my name.

Be this, says a picture that has been digitally “enhanced” beyond what is real. Be more educated, fit, cultured, well read, tolerant, emotional, in control, affluent, important. The desert is a comforting antagonist to such cancerous focus. Live says the desert, if you can.

Why did Jesus retreat to the desert? I think it was to be in the midst of place which so overwhelmingly lacks the world. The fasting even exacerbates that worldlessness, which I believe leads to focus on the things that are not of this world. And how did the devil tempt Him, with what did he tempt him with? With the world, with greatness in the world. And what is it that tempts us from the billboards and T.V. and magazines? Ambition of greatness, but that ambition is a hopeless one. We are all on our way down. We are all aging. Growing slower mentally and physically. Losing our youthful glean. Our world has been so infatuated with being great and the worldly aspects of greatness that its focus has intensified on youth and achievement and merit. The world has learned that only so much is humanly possible in one lifetime, and hoping to avoid alerting people of their inhuman possibilities in the Lord, it has refocused its distractive efforts to feeding our hopes in a fabricated potential. The potential of a fake youth, full of maturity, brilliance, and knowledge.

It’s no coincidence that with age comes the realization of the closeness of Jesus. When the world abandons us to wrinkles and aching joints what are we left with? Hopefully Jesus. For those who do not know Jesus they are merely left with the Hopelessness of lost potential.

I think such an environment leaves us with a certain affinity for distinct types of depression and desperation. Such as my desperation with rest. I feel like I shouldn’t. When I hear that God has prepared good works for me in advance I assume it means every waking moment that I am not working to better myself should be filled with His good works unfolding before me for completion. How I despair when I spend the day doing, as I put it “nothing”. Nothing? Nothing worldly yes, but what is transpiring spiritually when I am doing nothing? Much I should think. Is it not the Lord that calls us to stillness?

Why do I agree with the hopeless pressure to better myself and struggle against the hope found in the stillness of the Lord? In the garden, I assume there was not so much focus on us from the rest of the Lord’s creation as there is from our own. What monuments we build of ourselves with our billboards and T.V. and self improvement tapes and charity tax write offs.

At first I stated that the desert’s indifference depressed me. But I was wrong. I feel depressed when I am still because the world tells me to achieve and be meritous, most of all with the Lord. And it is mostly only when I try to apply that meritous drive to the Lord that I become depressed. Because I know it’s something with no hope. I can’t do that. I’m not supposed to do that.

I feel some hope in my drive for fitness and mental quickness, but that will fade with age and with it’s fading will come a similar desperation of losing something I thought I had the potential for. That’s what I’ve heard all my life. I grew up thinking that if I tried hard enough my name would be in the history books.

The book of life has no such qualifications. But I feel desperate sometimes for it to have some sort of merit base. Thank God it doesn’t.

The desert is indifferent to many things. My beauty and mental agility falls short of impressing the desert. The desert will quickly destroy them. My very life is unimpressive. But that’s the comfort, it’s appropriate to the desert for me to be unimpressive. Nothing I can do out there is impressive. Nothing that is outside of the works of Jesus at least. Making the rain come and go, moving mountains, giving life in a place that is so good at taking it; those things are impressive.

The world I live in though, specifically at my age and my current profession, is mounting an enormous assault on the peace of such indifference to the world that the desert illustrates so well. This attack was launched so furiously, and with a banner of evangelism and spiritual greatness that we found ourselves beyond the front line and deep into enemy territory.

Most of the past 500 years has seen the greatest assault on the peace of the Lord. The segmenting of life, and specifically the spiritual life and “everyday life”, the industrial revolution is guilty, the protestant work ethic is guilty, the very American spirit of American independence is guilty, the information age is guilty.

We have idols of beauty, intelligence, youth, and conspicuous kindness. Why else are our old left in Old Folks depositories to die alone and unheeded? Why do Christian missionaries long for the wildernesses of South America and Africa? They think it’s because that’s where their potential will show itself most apparently. Their greatness among the lowly. What numbers would come to the Lord in light of our advanced greatness and knowledge! In reality third world countries are a retreat from the blistering spiritual attacks of the “advanced” countries. Young Christians today yearn for the simple life and death struggles that they leave America in search of potential hunger and lack of shelter.

My depression on days when I don’t do much is this world applying its meritocracy to my faith and relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s nothing more than the hopelessness of the world’s ways tainting the promises of the Lord.

The amassing of government and cities and concentrations seems to take us further and further away from the wild life in the garden that we were intended for. With the amassing of people comes culture, and society, and the rules of being high society. Beauty becomes more important than goodness. Fashion, which has no place in nature, begins to consume people.

The assault by the evil one has been so ferocious that fashion has even begun to infiltrate the wilderness. REI, green peace, conservation and preservation issues, eco tourism and the organic craze are evidence of such an assault. Merit has infiltrated our rest as well. Who rests the best? Who has the most eco friendly, cultured, physically fit, enlightening vacations? Traveling is chic, and the “wilder” the places traveled to the better.

The desert has no time for such trivialities and offers no hope for those who long to hold on to such things. The beautiful dies just as quickly if not faster than the ordinary. Fashionable gear won’t help you find water when you need it, and it won’t make the rains come.

Our fight is not in the world, but with the world. What does the world have to show us? The places in ourselves where the world reigns indicates the casualties that we are taking because of its assault. The condition of the church in America, which has more sects than any nation in history, is a blatant prognosis of the wounds we have sustained.

The hope comes with the pain in those wounds. The pain forcing us to look for remedies, and that search is quickly wearing out the hopeless facilities of the billboards and magazine covers. How much harder this fight must be for the beautiful and rich.