A Commitment… 20 Years

TUES., MAY 11, 1999, 6:41 AM
FARM, STUDY

Yes, o son, you did miss one of Our “anniversary days,” but this Teaching can combine these “first two.” You are at a time in life when it becomes more difficult to keep track of days and dates.

It was on a “yesterday,” 20 years ago that I came to you in a creatively mystical way. You had a manuscript that, as you remember, was not quite finished, but did represent quite a number of writing hours. You couldn’t find it, here at the Farm, so you drove into your office. It wasn’t there, either. But it had to be somewhere.

On the drive back to the Farm… where it “had to be”… I put a “strange” idea into your mind and spirit. (It actually was more into your spirit, but the mind was essential for the actual action.) More than 14 years before this, during the last year you were at Stanford, before coming here (where you were to have 2/3 of your teaching career) you had committed yourself to some early morning writing. It was your writing, in your “sanctuary” on Casanueva, and you ceased doing it as you got ready to move, but it had set a kind of pattern.

So… driving back, in some condition close to panic, because of the lost manuscript, you “made a deal” with Me, the Lord God. “Let me find those important papers”, you said, “and I will reclaim that practice, that discipline, of arising from bed, early, to write” (or something like this… 20 years is a long time to remember exact words, even for Me). When you came into the Farmhouse and sat down at the breakfast table you looked to your left, and on that bench was a folder, with the yellow pages of your manuscript just showing. You said, “Thank you, Lord”, and the next morning you got up early and wrote “Here Beginneth.”

It was your writing, but I had to trust that you would remember and keep your “bargain,” which was one month of every-morning writing. So even though that manuscript was only a portion of quite a small book (and a good one, except as the Editor overruled your including Me as a real part of death and dying) it was a means I used, conveniently, to get you to commence this most positive, and wonderful, “addiction.”

You realize, as I did realize, that it would have been difficult, well nigh impossible, to have pushed and pulled you to this kind of a discipline” just after you came here. I needed you to be well established in your career, a tenured, full professor, known and respected by your colleagues, here and nationally. I needed you to have well-developed writing skills, for I wanted these “Teachings-to-be” to be well-written, without My having to “do miracles.”

I needed you to be comfortably settled here on the Farm, as well as established in your teaching role. Matthew was still a teenager, but Peter, a troubled adolescent, had been killed and had come back over for some help from Me as to what would be next, for him. Your other sons were into their 20’s, so you were almost past that difficult time for you, as a father.