The Days of Distress

Captain Butterfly was taken away in an Emergency ambulance today, after a very bad 24 hours. I am still waiting to find out where he is. I was not well enough to go with him, In fact he insisted I did not, as I guess he realised that would mean the hospital might end up with 2 patients rather than 1.

On Friday afternoon we went to the Pallant Gallery in Chi to see the Sussex Landscape Exhibition:  https://pallant.org.uk/whats-on/sussex-landscape-chalk-wood-and-water/

It was great - evocations of Sussex down the ages - but also troubling in that I found it so difficult and painful that I found myself wondering if I was experiencing my last trip to the Pallant.  It has been a constant in our retirement. We so often went there with Jacks - who is completely housebound now, just a voice on the phone.  We used to have lunch there after our trip to the current exhibition, when they had the old restaurant.  And when we drove back home, past Woodys, we remembered the times we used to go there with Bruce and Jackie.

Elon Musk's very expensive rocket, on being launched, experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly". Or, as we used to say in the olden days, it exploded, it blew up, Thankfully no-one was actually in it when this "disassembly" occurred, and no-one was hurt.

It seems we too are in the process of experiencing a "disassembly", as one after another, bits of us continue to go rusty and fall of.  However, given that we are damaged children of Adam, this cannot be said to be unscheduled. It was programmed into us from birth, as we were, through no fault of our own, born cut off from my Creator, my Source of life.

It is a "rapid disassembly". Well, yes, really it is, as, if you are young, I cannot convey to you how quickly seventy years goes by.  It seems only just yesterday that we were a young married couple.

As Ecclesiastes so rightly tells us when we are young, to remember our Grand Creator.

Remember, then, your Grand Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of distress come and the years arrive when you will say: “I have no pleasure in them.