July Heat, Remembrances, and Regrets?
I seem to have come to that point in life at which one ruminates over the past while in the midst of the simplest things.
I sat with an African-American friend on our porch the other day and a sudden image flashed into my mental view. It was the image of a document I have stored away. My dad bought a couple of shares of stock in the Westside Development Corporation...or some such innane title. It was really a racist entity developed to purchase houses in our community to keep black people from buying them during the turbulent 1960's. It happened anyway, and the community changed. I keep it as a mark of shameful remembrance of a time my dad came to regret as he accepted that we are all God's beautiful children no matter what our color.
I've spent some time looking at old family photos...well, some are actually even tintypes...my family recollection is beginning to span back nearly two centuries. I look at the faces of those gone and remember how short our lives really are. Like the psalmist says,"...what is man that thou art mindful of him?" We're sort of like Ben Franklin's ephemera. On a cosmic scale, we aren't very big, and we don't last very long.
And...I recall coming to Cartersville in 1991. I figured we'd be here four or five years and move on. It's coming up on twenty years and counting. You never know what God has in store for you.
Memories...reminisces...ruminations. Somehow they define us, but, if we honestly examine our past, it should be a basis for doing better in the future. I certainly hope mine are just that, so that I might do a better work for God in the time left me than I have done in they years past.
Curtis Rivers
7-7-20
I sat with an African-American friend on our porch the other day and a sudden image flashed into my mental view. It was the image of a document I have stored away. My dad bought a couple of shares of stock in the Westside Development Corporation...or some such innane title. It was really a racist entity developed to purchase houses in our community to keep black people from buying them during the turbulent 1960's. It happened anyway, and the community changed. I keep it as a mark of shameful remembrance of a time my dad came to regret as he accepted that we are all God's beautiful children no matter what our color.
I've spent some time looking at old family photos...well, some are actually even tintypes...my family recollection is beginning to span back nearly two centuries. I look at the faces of those gone and remember how short our lives really are. Like the psalmist says,"...what is man that thou art mindful of him?" We're sort of like Ben Franklin's ephemera. On a cosmic scale, we aren't very big, and we don't last very long.
And...I recall coming to Cartersville in 1991. I figured we'd be here four or five years and move on. It's coming up on twenty years and counting. You never know what God has in store for you.
Memories...reminisces...ruminations. Somehow they define us, but, if we honestly examine our past, it should be a basis for doing better in the future. I certainly hope mine are just that, so that I might do a better work for God in the time left me than I have done in they years past.
Curtis Rivers
7-7-20
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