THE PLAY'S THE THING

Sunset Before Dorian

DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE

THE PLAY’S THE THING

by Adam Carroll Draper

Hurricane Dorian is bearing down on Florida. Stefanie and I just escaped to Caswell Beach in North Carolina. Clouds and rain are coming at the very least. Go figure. It took an act of God to get us here. I can see the title: Escape from Rut. The battle with the Potentate of Circumstance is well fought - O fight it daily! It is supremely difficult to avoid the casualty of my tenuous grip on sanity, yet you see the picture above of sunset last night. That's enough.

The escape was worth the whizz of the bullets of neurosis. The backdrop on this scene is, nevertheless, a glaring distraction. Who decided to name this storm Dorian? Is it fitting or farcical? It reminds me of Dorain Grey, in both the name and in the brooding reality painted on the sky, slowly filling with clouds. An exquisite man who could not bear his fading beauty, chose rather to endure the ravages of self-absorption and watch the course of his aging in a painting of his disassociated self. It didn't work for him any more than I can avoid the rain.

The escape from the rut of my life is not a storm. It is a fervent hope in a future unattended by the droning of the engine that drives my wheels along the rut I made. Now that is the inescapable truth, I made this. One aspect of this rut (but not all) is practicing law, for sure. My friend Keith Stroud is fond of saying, "Practicing law just might be fun if you didn't have to make a living at it." That is not really the problem, though. At bottom lies the same curse that has plagued us since the fall, living off the "sweat of thy brow."

Stef and I sort of musically relived the 90's on our way down here. You know what I am saying. Music takes me back in time, like how I just think of parties at the beach when I hear "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Think about that one. Stef queued them up on Spotify and we sang our way here. As any sonorous slide through my 90's experience requires, we ran headlong into The Verve singing, "It's a bitter sweet symphony this life; trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die." Well, there it is again - the curse.

I'm not under the curse, right? "But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:19.

I'm not a slave to the money? I work every day only to glorify God, serve and enjoy him? Right! My experience is more like Satchmo singing, "Tell all Pharaoes to let my people go."

I have been talking to God about this - like a lot. As with Hurricane Dorian's approach, living by the sweat of my brow seems unavoidable at this moment. The stark backdrop to this scene, however, is a vision I had in 2002. I had been praying for my friend, Ann, who was in the hospital to die. She was eaten up with cancer. In this vision, Jesus was standing with me at the foot of her hospital bed. He told me to pray for her, and I responded that I figured he would just heal her.

"Do you believe that I will heal her because you asked me?"

"Lord, I know you can heal her," I said.

"That is not what I asked you. Do you believe that I will heal her because you asked me, Adam?"

I had to think about that one. Eventually, I told him that it had not been my experience that he did things just because I asked him, but that I understood this. I mean, He's God and I'm not. I thought this honest answer would please him. Instead, he looked at me like I'd just shot his dog or something. He went over to Ann and kissed her on her forehead. He told her that she was his "little flower," and that she was healed. I woke up.

I had that vision on a Saturday. The following Friday, they released Ann from the hospital - no cancer at all in her body.

Years later, I got around to asking Jesus why he looked at me like that. He said, "Is your faith in me or in your experience, Adam?"

Zikes!

Where does this lead me now? I don't know. Dorian is still coming and my life still seems destined to remain in the rut of my making. My faith is not in my experience, but I continue to toil under its cruel tutelage: "trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die." Yet I know the still, small voice. He leads me beside the still waters. That is the overture to this monotonous play. Perhaps, as with Hamlet, "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

I got the scent of a sense of a tiny glimmer sitting by the lulling waves yesterday evening. The experience here is not "the thing." He is. I had the briefest of whiffs of his sweetness. It was as if Yeshua was looking through my eyes, tasting with my mouth, smelling the sweet salt of his own endless sea.

We smiled.