Vintage Guitars and Zoo Animals

We recently took a week-long spring family vacation in Nashville, Tennessee.  Why Nashville?  Beats me how we actually ended up with the decision to go there, but my kids like music, and my son Christopher was crazy about blues guitar and B.B. King, so we ran with it.  In any case, getting my son exposed to live performances at the Music City couldn't be that bad, considering that a couple of years ago he was mostly listening to stuff like Weezer, Linkin Park and Nirvana.  At his current rate of evolution in musical taste, I was hoping that he will become a Brahms and Mozart devotee in a few years.

We knew that great times lay ahead the moment we arrived at the rental car counter at Nashville International Airport.  The midsize sedan that we requested was not available, and we were offered instead a brand new Ford Crown Victoria for no extra charge.  Sweet.  The only other time that I drove a car that big was when I chauffeured a friend for his wedding.  For the next several days, we rolled in style to the Hard Rock Cafe, the Bluebird Cafe, B.B. King's Blues Club, the Grand Ole Opry, and the Country Music Hall of Fame.  We also attended Sunday service at the Nashville Cowboy Church.  While we all enjoyed the experience, none had a better time than my son, who listened and observed the performances critically, and grinned ear to ear during displays of excellence on stage.  He also was busy with the camera, taking dozens of snapshots of vintage guitars that were in display cases throughout the city.  Between excited shouts beckoning me to check out another guitar that was of immense historical interest, he would wax poetic about the instrument's background, the musician/band's place in music history, distinguishing features between the sounds of Gibson, Fender, Taylor and Martin guitars and why certain musicians prefer certain brands, the differences between a Stratocaster and a Telecaster, etc.  The rest of the family saw pretty guitars in showcases.  My son witnessed instead the panorama of American folk music history unfolding before his eyes.  He was totally into it.

We also spent an afternoon strolling through the Nashville Zoo.  The layout of the grounds was quite beautiful, and we enjoyed watching the animals.  Some of the memorable sights included the meerkats, the flamingos, and a snake in the midst of devouring a mouse. The hundreds of animals on display were mostly vaguely familiar creatures that we either saw in other zoos, on television or in books.  We had a fun time, but didn't really see or learn anything new.  It was a nice way to spend a few hours and burn off some calories.

I am presently engaged in a different kind of strolling, intending to have my eyes walk through the entire Bible in one year.  Although I have already read the Bible from cover to cover many times during my Christian journey, God continues to reveal to me precious gems from seemingly familiar verses, and these treasures continue to be uncovered even in parts of Scripture that I have read hundreds of times.  Nevertheless, the joy that I experience from reading God's word pale in comparison to the writer of Psalm 119, whose praise of God's law took 176 verses, and includes such uninhibited exclamations as:

How I long for your precepts!
In your righteousness preserve my life.  (Psalm 119:40)


O, how I love your law!
I meditate on it all day long.  (Psalm 119:97)


How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!  (Psalm 119:103)

May our journey through God's word be much more than just a casual stroll through the zoo.  May we be totally into it, and may our eyes light up like my son's when he gazed at B.B. King's autographed "Lucille".  We have photos.

Sand Castles

My family has been to many beaches.  We left our footprints in the sand in Santa Monica, Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Malibu, Huntington Beach, Pismo Beach, Waikiki, Kailua Beach (my favorite one in Hawaii!), and Cancun, just to name a few.  My kids built sand castles in most of them.  They would invariably find a spot on the beach that was well below the tide line and within a couple of feet of the lapping waves, start digging trenches and pile mounds of sand as a fortress against the invading waters.  By the time the fortress reached about a foot in height, a large wave would come up and wash up a good chunk of their work, and the kids would shriek in delight, dig harder and put up more reinforcements against upcoming surges of seawater.  This would last for about an hour, and by the time we were ready to leave the beach, the sand castle was nowhere to be found, reclaimed by the sea.

The beach is like God's dry erase board or Etch-a-Sketch.  No matter what's on it, it eventually gets wiped clean.

I stood in front of the television at a local McDonald's restaurant one morning in March 2011, with my Egg McMuffin in hand and my eyes transfixed on images of the devastating tsunami that ravaged the Japanese coast near Sendai.  Colossal man-made structures were literally tossed around in the water like bathtub toys, and entire villages literally disappeared once the water receded.  Tens of thousands of lives were lost or forever changed in an instant.

They were wiped clean, like sand castles below the tide line.

We recently took a family vacation in Nashville, Tennessee, and spent many days enjoying barbeque, eating deep-fried foods, and listening to wonderful live music.  We also spent some time visiting a replica of the Greek Parthenon, which is now a museum.  The replica was quite a beautiful and imposing structure, and demonstrated how it might have looked like in the Acropolis two thousand years ago.  In comparison, the actual Parthenon in Greece has only relatively skeletal remains, and it will continue to erode over time.  How will it look like in, say, two thousand more years?

It is good to turn our eyes toward things eternal, for all of our striving on earth will eventually be wiped clean.

"All people are like grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the glory of the Lord endures forever."
(1 Peter 1:24-25)