Behold, Random Thoughts

I have been enjoying the fall without a job. It is a joyous time for I am not beholden to any suit or the government for my situation. Ken, my older brother, and Jane, his wife, stopped by yesterday on their way back from Branson, MO. I showed them my retirement house and we rejoiced in my good fortune to have found a place that is quiet and where I have found a measure of contentment in spite of losing my job. He and his older son, Matthew, have had an auction business for several years now. They have yet to make a clear profit from it; all funds that are cleared from an auction are used to build up the business. This was the first year they allowed themselves to pay each other a modest sum from the business. It takes a long time to build up a business or even expand an existing one. Theirs is entirely a family owned and operated enterprise with no employees. My brother finally found something he really enjoys doing: auctioneering.   

Before they arrived at noon I had taken my coffee walk up Main Street. A cool foggy day shrouded the small town and brought out the Halloween colors, street signs appeared a brighter orange against the gray, turning leaves were all the brighter in the mist. Cattle in a pasture south of town grazed on grass, mist rose around them as the sun began to burn off the haze. When I got back home there was a message on my cell phone from Ken, he was just east of Eads, CO and wanted to know if I would be home. I called him back and told him to come on to Rocky Ford. After they left I sat in the sun in the back yard and read more of The Worst Hard Time. The author quoted Ezekiel 22:13, “Behold, I have smitten my hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made.” This was in reference to the homesteaders in the Dust Bowl area who had come to believe that God was punishing them for having made such profits during the early wheat boom. But their harvest was not dishonest; they grew a crop and in doing so they unwittingly ruined the land. The whole sentence reads: “Behold, I have smitten my hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made and at the blood you have shed in your midst.” 

This passage struck me as I sat listening to a cicada in the warm afternoon sun under a now cloudless blue Colorado sky. “The dishonest gain which thou hast made,” stuck in my mind. Many a dishonest gain has been wiped out along with many an honest one in the last few months. Will those who have made a dishonest gain be smitten? Will those whose honest gain has been lost be restored to solvency? Life does not lead to equal outcomes in the temporal sense. If I hadn’t bought a retirement home and sold my other house, where would I be? If I hadn’t followed my own sense of the market, where would I be? This morning dawned clear and cool and I drank my coffee leaning on the fender of my Ford F-150 in the back yard, watched a jet traverse the blue sky leaving a short dissipating contrail while a flock of black birds a few hundred feet up flew in the opposite direction to the southeast.   Behold my good fortune and may God bless every honest endeavor.

From my corner of Main Street and Beech in Rocky Ford, CO

Dr. K