Leaving Valdosta.

8/24-25

I moved back up from Georgia this past spring. I was working in Valdosta and decided that it was time to roll out. With 14 dollars in my pocket, 2 bags of clothes and a gimpy foot I started walking north from damn near Florida up Interstate 75. After 3 months in Lowndes County, I decided to trade the plantation incorporated as the stae of Georgia for another plantation with better roads and not as many 100 degree days. Then as now, it seemed like madness to do what I did. But I woke up in the dark of the morning with a need like desert thirst to leave the chain gang state. It wasn't a logical or reasonable thingto do and I am a reasonable person. But over time I have learned a lot of things about my space in the world. When to stand. When to fight. When to chill. I've also learned to move when the universe says move. And when the Universe woke me from my sleep that Saturday morning, it was shouting MOVE! And so I did.

I'd come to Valdosta partly because my seasonal job with Sally in Albany was over and because a close friend was moving to Valdosta to enroll in nursing school at Valdosta State. She needed a friend in a strange town and I fit the bill. I kept her straight helped her find a place to live. I worked, She worked. We drifted apart. The thin line between love and hate snapped and neither of us could stand to see the other.

So there I was on the road. A good 15 miles into a journey of several hundred when I see the Firetruck red Ford Festiva that I'd come to town in a few months earlier. My ex-friend through a confluence of events including a homesickness, bad traffic, a free television set and my early morning wake-up call had put us on the same stretch of highway at the same time. Long story short, I got a ride to my destination. Was it the same force that woke me up and told me to move? Did that same force allow me to run into my former boss who needed work done and allowed me to earn my busfare to North Carolina? How could it not be?

Some would call this coincidence. Some would call the events a sign of the miraculous power of God. I don't believe in coincidence, miracles or luck. My faith is in the Law of cause and effect. The fact that I cannot explain an event does not allow me to call it supernatural. It simply reveals the state of my ignorance.

The tendency to label events as miraculous or supernatural is a holdover from the days of man's development as an intellectual being. Awareness of self. Awareness of surroundings limited by a lack of understanding of that which cannot be seen or comprehended. Hence, what we don't understand we credit (or blame as the case may be) the unseen. God.

"God is man's ideal. As man grows, his God grows". My God is the creator of the Universe. My God doesn't get angry and slay villages; nor send tsunamis out of wrath upon non-believers. My God cannot be contained by the word God. But my God is good all the time. After all God is my ideal.