I should probably start by noting that I was wrong (again) about the price of the new book. It will be $12.95. A further saving for you, the valued consumer!
I rode down to Iowa with four other guys on Saturday. Not Viking stuff, but Sverdrup Society stuff. We had a meeting in Radcliffe, Iowa, which is where my paternal grandfather spent his childhood, and it’s a place I haven’t visited much, so I thought I’d go. (Travel report: it looks pretty much like the rest of Iowa.)
What surprised me was how much I enjoyed it. We talked all the way down and back (it’s about a three-hour trip), and I actually had a good time. Even now my subconscious is working in the background, reprocessing the memory, finding reasons to believe that I made a jerk of myself and spoiled everybody’s day, but—for the record—I had a good time.
I heard a couple memorable quotations. A pastor of Finnish ancestry told us something his father used to say—“I don’t know if I understand all these things I know.”
And someone quoted an old North Dakota farmer, what you’d call a “character,” known to a couple of the guys present, who used to say, “These modern times! When will they end?”
Tonight, more proofing.
When will it end?
It is good to know I am not the only one who revisits a “good time” in my life and trys to find something wrong or foolish that I did during that “good time”. I led prayer meeting at my church for the first time the other evening, something I felt totally unworthy to do, but a former teacher who attends asked me or told me I should, so still feeling the authority of the teacher, I said yes. It went well, according to all who attended and even received a card from a long time member thanking me for the blessing she had received. That should have ended the retrospective searching for a wrong word or unneccesary laugh, but it didn’t. So perhaps God allows this so we will remember that He uses us through our weakness not our strengths. If we always think we are quite good at something, we might not remember to go to Him for help and that it is through Him our best work is done.