I went out to the airport to pick up my friend Dick Kirby this afternoon, and the light was just right for a picture of my city.  There are days when the city belongs to some unknown entity, a person or a group, but not to me.  When the light is just right, it belongs to me.  The boats and the water and the sky are mine and the buildings are mine... the world is mine.

My feeling about the city today brings to mind the question with which I have been wrestling for the past couple of days; and I wondered if everybody had days like this one has been for me, days when nothing is wrong in the world.  Of course, today Donald Trump, and as a matter of fact, none of the others who are trying for a place on a special ballot which we'll mark to elect the next president of the United States have figured into my picture of the world. My sense of the universe is limited to what I can see, and what I could see today was absolutely wonderful... no fighting, no wars, no divorce, no hungry children, no people without a place to sleep when nightfall comes... everything is right. I've heard a saying since I was little, "God's in His heaven and all's right with the world." For me it has never meant anything like what the literal words suggest.  When I've heard someone say it, I've never wondered who or where God is or where heaven is, and I've known since I was a small child that there aren't days when literally "All's right with the world."  When I was a child in Arkansas, there was a war going in Europe and I knew it, and I knew there were people who were suffering.  I didn't know the details of the Holocaust, but I knew there was something terribly wrong, even when I was a child.  I knew the perfect, spacious school I attended in Roseboro, Arkansas, was for white children only; and my Mother kept me aware that black children in that little town went to school in a shanty on the other side of a mill pond. She didn't like segregation, of adults or children; but she kept from me the extent of the suffering of Americans who were not white.  Her brothers were in Europe during the war... fighting... seeing what the rest of the world was like, and although I knew something about the unfairness of things in the world, I didn't learn until I was older that there are people who never have a day when the world belongs to them.

On Sunday, I got an e-mail response to my Saturday BLOG writing from my friend Taylor Hill who lives in Florida.  I've known Taylor long enough to know he has days in Florida that belong to him the way this day in San Diego belongs to me.  I got his permission to share his writing:

Jerral,

Reading your writing this morning before heading out to church, I am struck especially about your second paragraph--"I have been preoccupied lately with an awareness that my existence is known really only by me," etc.  

I have been thinking a lot about that very thing, not for the altruistic reason you write, concerning racism in our country, but I think about my individuality as a way for preparation for my own death eventually-- sort of like W. C. Fields, when he was found uncharacteristically reading the Bible one day, and a friend asked him what he was doing.  Fields responded, "I'm cramming for my finals.  It's not that I feel that death is pending, (although one never knows), it's just that I'm aware that I am in the winter time of life.

As I get older it comes home to me more and more that we are so individual, so alone.  This is one reason that significant human contact means so much to me.  I don't mean being in a crowd, I hate that, even in a church crowd, but with someone who may have some interest in me, some sympathy, a willingness to listen.  I have discovered people like that in my life (you are one of them) but they are rare.

It occurred to me yesterday as I thought of this, that I have no idea what it would be like to be female, no inkling of what it would be to be a person of color in our mostly white culture, no idea of what it would be like to have a different sexual orientation.  I am of the privileged class--white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, male, heterosexual.  So I am dependent on people who are different from me to help me to understand their world, their experience.  To me that is a microcosm of the church and a picture of the Kingdom of God, where the lion and the lamb lie down together, where children play on the holes of the asps, where men beat their swords into pruning hooks and their spears into plowshares.

Grace and peace,

Taylor