The year 2024 has been a consequential year for us. I will save that part to last. A song says, “We are just ordinary people we don’t know which way to go.” Another song, Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, has a couple of turns of phrase that, taking them out of context and applying them to this year, seem applicable:
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
'Till the landslide brought me down
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I've been afraid of changing
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too
I turned 73 this month. Many people reach this decade of life and have physical issues that bring them to doctors regularly. We have avoided that. I am thankful for the physical health I enjoy. There are times when I am working out that I feel like I did when I was in my forties, and I was running and doing well then. I am thankful for how Suzanne and I have matured together and are still very much in love with each other. She continues to cook healthy meals.
We like our TV shows and movies at night. I especially liked: Bad Sisters, The Six Triple Eight, Your Friend, Nate Bargatze, Carry-on, Abigail, The Resident, Fear the Walking Dead, A Biltmore Christmas, Stuck in Love, The Mezzotint, The World’s Fastest Indian, Dark Winds, The Menu, John Wick: Chapter 4, Black Mass, Northern Exposure, Suits (excellent series), The Whale, From (TV series), Red, The Surrogate, My All-American, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, Secrets & Lies, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Fury, Inside the Mind of a Dog, In Plain Sight, Sugar, Presumed Innocent, Your Honor, The Night of the Hunter, Brief Encounter, I Am: Celine Dion, The Gentlemen, Fallout (excellent take on video game and dystopian future), Ripley, Rust Creek, The Catcher was a Spy, Masters of the Air, One Day (an interesting almost philosophical reflection), Napolean, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Holdovers, Oppenheimer, Sound of Freedom, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Killers of the Flower Moon, Young Sheldon, L. A. Confidential, Carol and the End of the World (philosophical series)
Suzanne and I are still enjoying Pasco County in Florida. Steve and Glenda have good friends to us in our stay at Fairway Springs. We enjoy Farmer’s Market that Generations Church has on first Saturday of the month. We have gone to a few of those free lunches that people our age are invited to, usually related to funeral arrangements or to investments.
Our sons, Randy. Tim, Michael, and David, remain in Indianapolis. Tim and Randy are in trucking jobs, David works for a non-profit advocacy group based in Washington DC and contacts some of the powerful senators and representatives in Congress, and Michael works for PNC and is thankful that parts of his job he can help people. I have had some good conversations with Michael and David on the telephone. Tim and his girlfriend Kelly were here in April. I am thankful that a friend in Indianapolis, Craig, continues to keep up with me. We survived the two hurricanes this year with minor damage to the fence at the house and no flooding.
A notable change in our home came at the end of August
when we purchased a standard poodle puppy, now 6 months old. We are learning what it is like to have a two-year-old around the house, always saying “No” to the dog. She has introduced me to a morning walk of about a mile before I go the fitness center. Yes, it is frustrating at times, but we can also see what a wonderful addition she is and will be. We still have Sofie, our silky terrier.
At the Chapel
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| Pastors Kyle and Jaye |
We continue attending the Chapel at Trinity, Florida. If you were to read the theological statement for the church, those who know me would realize quickly that my personal theology would not align well with that of the church. Yet, its focus upon relating people to Jesus Christ, its honoring of the Word of God in music and preaching, its attraction of a generationally and racially diverse community of faith, and its continued growth in the four years we have attended from three worship services on the weekend to four on one campus and two at another and another campus coming, has attracted me. We have enjoyed their First Wednesday worship events. At the beginning of each year, they have a prayer and fasting for three weeks, during which they open the worship center for private prayer and communion, which I have found meaningful. We have been attending with two persons from Palm Harbor, Bill and Joyce, and often go out to eat on Sunday with them, although we usually to the Saturday night service as well. In that time, the church has added a fourth service on the weekend and has expanded by adding a campus in Port Richey and will add another campus in Odessa. We enjoy the lead pastor, Pastor Q, very much, but enjoy the entire communication team, as well as Pastor Jay as worship leader. It has been such a joy to see in action a congregation that is doing ministry in the way I have read about over the years as an active pastor. This is one of those growing, independent, evangelical, Baptist-oriented congregations United Methodist pastors often read about. As one analyst put it, Baptist thinking is the default position of many of the growing evangelical churches. I will admit that when we first attended, I was looking for the pastor to say something that was out there theologically, but I have yet to hear it. He gave a series on the Ten Commandments. I have both a series of sermons and a long study of them, but what he shared was remarkably close to what I had done. The only time I cringe a bit is the few times during the year he says something like “this Baptist church.” However, this year he has also had some good moments when he included the phrase that went something like, “I am referring to sanctification here,” and it was an effective way to talk about it, as well as pleasing my Wesleyan-Methodist soul. I am on the Events Team, which is enjoyable both for the people we meet and in being behind the scenes. The church has communion once a month, and I have enjoyed being part of the team that puts the elements and tables used for the weekend services back in their storage area. It has been a pleasure to have some acquaintance with the pastoral staff, especially Pastor Kyle, who carved out some time for a coffee with me in September.
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| 15,000 candles in 4 hours |
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| Unusual physical labor |
On a personal level, I have maintained a good physical fitness routine. As one person put it: “You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.”’ I have long been one to think of mind, body, and spirit as intricately connected. This has meant going to Crunch, which is 3 miles away, doing so 6 days a week. I focus on arms and shoulders one day, back and chest the next, and core legs the next, and then repeat. I do yoga every day, which helps with flexibility and balance. I have HIIT routine at the end of each day to get my heart rate up. I have met some good people there, both members and trainers, who have been helpful in fine tuning what I learned a long time ago with P90X videos. I am thankful that many persons have witnessed to me that I am an inspiration to them and am an encouragement to keep going. A couple of young black men particularly touched me in taking the initiative to say this. “Don’t you ever stop,” said one, and my response was that I have been exercising since I was 18. It is in my DNA now. They touched me at that moment because i have longed for healing in racial relationships, and that might be part of how it happens.
I had the privilege of being a mentor for a female study at Asbury Seminary, which we met on zoom, since she was in West Virginia. Her theological interests and interest in writing was a good match.
The book group has continued to meet by zoom. Glenn, Tim, Lynn, and Chuck have been such insightful readers of some wonderful authors. These have included Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism and stimulated some reflections on Karl Marx, Renee Girard, and presently includes Paul Ricoeur on forgiveness and philosophical anthropology. I still maintain a web site that shares my reflections on the books we read: https://wolfhartpannenberg.blogspot.com.
I completed a study of the Old Testament, apocrypha, and pseudepigrapha up to the first century AD. I hope it will become a book at some point. They are part of my updated reflections on the lectionary texts. This led into a study of the synoptic gospels. I have been finding Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition and Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology, as well as the study of the parable by him and C. H. Dodd, and a couple of books on the Son of Man sayings, to be illuminating. Of course, I have preached and taught these gospels many years, but it has been a gift to bring it all together.
I continue to update my lectionary studies: https://lectionarypondering.blogspot.com.
I have two books published, one on the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth and the other derives from my spiritual formation experiences in the Indiana Annual Conference, a book that explores spiritual formation and ends with a collection of brief prayers that I hope will be helpful to those who want to nourish their relationship with God. I have an author home page that invite you to explore: https://sites.google.com/site/georgeplastererhomepage/Home. I am working on a third book that will complete my reflections that arise out of my spiritual formation experiences. It should come out by the summer or fall of 2025.
This was a presidential election year. It had unique qualities that I am sure I have not witnessed in my lifetime. If you are interested, you can read my reflections here.
Now, for the hard part of our year. There was something alluring about buying a home. Most of it was the sense of place where we could settle down, get established, and root ourselves in a community. There is a wonderful philosophical series, Carol at the End of the World, in which, in episode 9, she is searching for the perfect wave on which to surf. She never found it, but she realized that the only thing different was her. She was searching for something that did not need to be found. It is quite human to search for something to give life a sense of fullness, significance, and meaning.
Michael D. Powell, Look, Listen, Love, and Live said the following about the significance of learning in our lives:
1. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
2. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial-and-error experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works."
3. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
4. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
5. "There" is no better than "here." When your "there" has become a "here," you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here."
We learned much through this experience. I am sure that had we done more due diligence in researching this purchasing a home we could have avoided this. Had we had a home in the north that we sold and in which we had equity, it might have worked. However, the one time we bout in the north was not a pleasant experience either. I get that if one is young, it would be worth the investment, but as a retired couple, with modest means, it was not a wise financial decision. It would be easy to be bitter about a few things. Just because a realtor is on the Dave Ramsey web site and goes to your church does not mean the realtor is looking out for your interests. That was a harsh learning. However, bitterness is not a way to live. It is not worth the time or energy. We learned some things about purchasing a home in Florida. It is unlikely in the highest degree that we will ever do that again, but if we did, we would know the pitfalls.
Beyond that, we learned somethings about ourselves that we should have known before we bought. To put it humorously (Steven Wright): “Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.” To put it a finer point on it, in The Once and Future King by T. H. White, he notes in The Sword and the Stone, Ch. 21, “The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. … There is only one thing for it then — to learn. … That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” Most of the learning we have about self and world is through some pain. He also observes in The Ill-Made Knight, Ch. 13, that such lessons, such knowledge of the world, cannot be taught to the young. They are for the middle-aged and even older. When young, some of us can have a seriousness in our approach to life because we want to get it right. As we mature, we might realize how rarely we get it right, so we might as well relax and learn what we can. The wise person in the little book Jonathan Livingston Seagull said the reason we are is to love and to learn. At our age, we are still learning.
We discovered that we like renting. It is convenient to submit work orders and others take care of it quickly. The amenities here are genuinely nice. In fact, I have changed the place I work out. It is like having my own gym, although occasionally our new neighbors are there, of course. They even have monthly gathering, such as wine tastings, for the residents. As was said on episode of Northern Exposure, some people are owners and some people are renters, and we have decided that we are renters.
I question the reliability of what I feel. When we moved to the Dunedin area in 2017, both of us said it felt like home. When we toured Fairway Springs, both of us had that feeling that this home.
Having a place for ourselves and our stuff is important, but not as important as creating a healthy home. A house can become too expensive, it can collapse, it can be abandoned. Losing a house does create some sadness. It is a large investment. When something goes wrong there, a family will go through much upheaval and dramatic changes. The family might go to a new house, but it will take some time to make it a home. Yet, I must say that Trinity Club has already been feeling like home.
The feeling of home in this earthly life is something that we carry with us. It evokes something of the desire for what Charles Taylor made the title of his book Cosmic Connections. He means by this an experience shot through with joy, significance, and inspiration, which he thinks is a human constant. The desire suggests a higher and deeper than the everyday world around us. It hints that there is something more, that a well-lived human life is more than the abundance of the things one possesses. Such moments cannot prove the existence of this higher or deeper order, but they suggest that the hope for it results in a surplus of meaning that a simple rational or mathematical approach to the world would suggest. Thus, we delude ourselves if we think any place here is truly home. That feeling may well be an anticipation of the home God has prepared for us in eternity, in the loving fellowship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A song often sung at the Chapel:
Praise the Father
Praise the Son
Praise the Spirit
Three in one
God of glory
Majesty
Praise forever to the King of Kings
We look forward to 2025 with much optimism. Part of that, admittedly, is the financial freedom that we are moving toward. We begin with high hopes for next year, given our new financial situation. My hope is to get my third book published. I also hope to finish by study of the synoptic gospels and continue my study of the rest of the New Testament. We will need to keep focused upon training our standard poodle. We need to finish moving into our apartment, most of which is the second bedroom and putting up pictures. On the fun side, we hope to share more trips to the beach.
Another song I love, but which I hope you can read as prayer for you:
So come on my soul, oh, don't you get shy on me
Lift up your song, 'cause you've got a lion
Inside of those lungs
Get up and praise the Lord
Oh, come on my soul, oh, don't you get shy on me
Lift up your song, 'cause you've got a lion
Inside of those lungs
For any who read this, we wish you the best for the coming year. God be with you.
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| Hurricane Helene |
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| Hurricane Milton |
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| Sioux Falls Restaurant |
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| Pipe tobacco and cigars from his establishment |
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| David, Kari, Henry, Edith, Alice, Lewis |
