Whew! Another one finished! (Frankly, I never thought I’d get this far. I can’t imagine not finishing the whole series now.)
I hope to begin Book 7 in a couple of weeks, so you won’t have to deal with this little cliffhanger for too long.
Thank you for sticking with me this far!
There is a gathering taking place, a concern for the safety of those who don’t understand how the world is about to change.
Many don’t realize the dangers that are coming.
Do we fully understand? Are we rescuing?
Seriously, just “subscribe” to my YouTube channel because clearly I can’t remember to post my chapters here in a timely maner. I keep thinking I have only two chapters to post, until I look and see that, today for example, I have several more than two.
Sorry.
A few more chapters before I head out of town for the weekend. I’ll be on the road for a few days, so nothing new until next week–sorry. But then next week school starts for teachers again (having to pay bills ruins all my fun), so chapters may be a little more sporadic. Sorry again.
Warning for the chapters below–you might want a tissue, especially for chapter 13.
Five more chapters for you! (My summer’s rapidly ending, but it’s so ridiculously hot here in the tropics, I might as well spend my days in school, anyway . . .)
Days like this, I wish I were in Yellowstone National Park, where I imagined many of these scenes in these chapters taking place. Unlike here, in Yellowstone the nights are cool, the bugs not so plentiful, and there are no gators in the water. (One of the many reasons I don’t camp here.)
My summer break is rapidly coming to a close (we start school again in early August) so I’m trying to get out as many chapters as I can before then.
These chapters make me want to go camping . . . but only for a few minutes, then I’m over it. (She cranks up the air conditioning because July in Florida is brutal–but never below 78F because the electrical bill is even more brutal.)
I took a little time off to try to edit my earlier recordings in an attempt to make “real” audio books (still in the process). Listening to myself read the entire first book again took a while, and then I was deleting errors, and all of that made me sick of my own voice (again).
But I wanted to get Book 6 going, so here are the first two chapters of Flight of the Wounded Falcon. And because there are a LOT of new characters (it’s been 25 years, after all) in the form of children and grandchildren, here are a few charts to help keep everyone straight.
Family Lines and names: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15acqWtGlRtTMyoOFzgjVi4lxCc66m224hbZXvrW5x_w/edit?usp=sharing
Or look here for MAPS and FAMILY LINES https://forestedgebooks.com/books-6-8-maps-and-family-lists/
Merry Christmas, friends!
I had so hoped that today I could give you a full download of book 1 in one chapter-separated audio file, and a lot of Book 2 chapters as an audio book.
However, at Thanksgiving we were visited by the stomach flu bug, which a week later was followed by COVID. Both my husband and I were felled at the same time, nearly within the same hour. There were COVID outbreaks at both of our jobs, before and after we became ill, and at our son’s part-time job (he brought us home the stomach flu first).
For 10 days we were knocked down, hard.
Blessedly, our college-age son was well enough to get drive-thru dinners for his siblings, and our teenage daughter who had no symptoms could go through self-checkout lines and get us supplies of Gatorade and soup (shout-out to Progresso and Campbells Chunky soups for being so easy and making us feel like we were swallowing down bowls of vitamins).
We’ve also been enormously blessed to have understanding bosses who cared more for our well-being than the fact that we were missing over a week of work.
But most of all, I’m grateful for specific blessings of health. One Saturday, five days sick, I crashed, hard. My tachycardia heart couldn’t calibrate itself, and I felt a fatigue I’ve never experienced before. I worried that this might be “it.” But I also knew it wasn’t “it”. I know there is more that I need to do in this life. And since 99.7% of people recover (with few ever needing hospitalization), why should I not think I could?
I asked my husband to pray for me, specifically requesting that I begin to get over this. He did, promising that I “would begin to reclaim my life, day by day.” The next day, I was well enough to get down to the couch. The next day, I was stronger still.
By the next Saturday, one week later, I felt so healthy that I scrubbed all of the bathrooms, rearranged my closet (my “recording studio”), tossed out three bags of purged junk, and made dinner AND dessert. Two days after that, I walked my regular three-mile circuit, pulled by a puppy I’m babysitting, with no problems.
Prayer works.
In fact, it’s really the only thing that does.
I still have bronchitis which visits me yearly, but even that is waning, so hopefully soon I’ll have enough voice and fewer coughing fits that I can get back to recording Book 2 very soon.
I feel reborn in a strange way. Everything about my body feels different somehow, similar to as after having a baby. The body has to “find” itself again and reclaim what it used to be. I’ve heard others recovering from COVID mention the same thing. (And not all of it is bad–I see advantages to not having a sense of smell: my house has never smelled cleaner! Anyone have stinky diapers they need changed? I can do that, no problem.)
But already I know I won’t go back to what I was. Nor do I want to. I feel God pushing me on to different planes. I did a lot of thinking when I was feverish and exhausted (not much else you can do except watch reruns of “The Crown”).
Much was taught to me during those two weeks, and I’m looking into ideas and meditations that I haven’t before, finding great strength and insight I haven’t expected. (And I also have all these lovely natural immunities; bodies are strong and resilient.)
Nothing’s the same, anywhere.
Friends, if you haven’t felt that the world is different yet, you have to, or you’ll be surprised in very unpleasant ways.
Two years ago, this COVID threat began to rise in Wuhan, China. But that wasn’t all. More came with it, much that we couldn’t yet see, but it’s been impressed upon me for the past two years that the world is changing, and will continue to change. I believe much of that will be revealed in the next year.
There’s no going back to “normal.”
Why would the “Administrators” give back power once they’ve taken so much hold of it? Not without a battle, not without some kind of catastrophic collapse of power. That will be coming, I feel it in my gut and in my mind.
I haven’t seen one country in the world relinquish any of the additional control it’s illegally seized since this all began. Trust me–none ever will peacefully.
When I wrote Book 6 Flight of the Wounded Falcon where Young Pere travels to Edge and finds a strange, unpredictable place, it nearly broke my heart to do that to Edge, a village I’d grown to love.
But a strange impression came over me as I drafted those pages: Our world would also, in a few years, become as strange and unpredictable. It would become unrecognizable. And it has. Frankly, I didn’t think it’d happen for many more years—I wanted to be older and wiser when everything started to go weirdly downhill. But it’s happening now.
Nothing in the next few years will be anything that we’re used to. All we can do is hold on and listen to the promptings of the Spirit, which may tell you to do something different than it tells me, because we are all on different paths.
Most of all, we need to have compassion for each other, love for those whose paths are different, and choose to cling to each other, and not let the sharp divisiveness that is trying to pit city against city, family against family, parent against child. It’s been prophesied, but it doesn’t have to happen to you or me.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Revelator and others saw our day. And honestly, they saw terrible, strange things. But we can get through these years if we choose to love despite everything, choose to support instead of tear down, and choose to hear Him, who I promise is coming, sooner than we realize.
It’s time to build Zion, beginning in our own hearts.
All my love and hope for you this coming year. We’ll need all that we can get.
No babies should try to walk until we’re sure they’ll not fall down.
No child should take an exam until they’ll get every problem correct.
No learner of a second language should utter a word until they’re sure they’ll pronounce it right.
No one should drive cars until we can guarantee they’re 100% safe from accidents.
No one should leave their houses until all danger is gone (never mind that most accidents occur in the home . . .).
Do what makes you feel safe, but don’t forget that in this world there’s no such thing as “completely safe.”
Life’s not supposed to be safe. How can we grow in a dull, quiet bubble? We can’t. And why would we want that? The greatest growth comes from the biggest mistakes. We learn more from failures than successes.
Remember Miss Frizzle on the “Magic School Bus”? She was right. (Although I’ll agree that bus was potentially terrifying, still I’d go on it and sit next to Ralphie.)
(Quote from Book 6, Flight of the Wounded Falcon, here and here.)
It took Zelda at my church inadvertently shaming my copper bottom pots to help me realize that often we live lower than we should.
It started when we were cleaning up after a meal at our church. In the corner had sat a copper-bottom pot, unclaimed for months. Zelda picked it up and frowned. “Disgraceful! Look at the bottom of this. I’ve had my Revere Ware for 50 years and it still looks as good as the day I got it.”
I swallowed. It wasn’t my pot, but my bottom was even more tarnished. (My pot, that is.)
“That’s not how it’s supposed to look?” I meekly asked.
Zelda turned on me as if I’d just confessed to eating baby monkeys. “Good gravy, no! A little elbow grease, a little maintenance, and it should stay shiny for a century. This could be much better!”
I didn’t know that.
I went home and looked at my pots—three of them—that I’ve owned for 30 years. Not shiny.
I didn’t realize this wasn’t normal.
Her words hung above me for days. This could be much better.
So one Saturday morning, I went to work on my bottoms. (The pots, that is.) After half an hour of scrubbing, Comet, vinegar, baking soda, and steel wool I was astonished to realize that, daggum, my pot could be much better.
In my sink, with baking soda and vinegar and only about 10 minutes of work.
I did the next two pots, and a relatively short time I had wiped out decades of neglect.
In the month since I’ve cleaned my pots, I’ve been much more diligent about keeping them clean. It takes all of 30 seconds each time I wash them.
So THAT color is copper! I’d forgotten.
That got me thinking of how many other tasks we let get away from us, then decide in quiet despair that there simply isn’t a better way, that life is always this tarnished, or dirty, or hopeless.
It’s not.
What if we spent an hour trying to make something better? Just one hour? Instead of going online to complain how someone shamed us (Zelda didn’t mean to, she’s a lovely lady whom I love dearly), what if we get to work fixing things instead?
Over the years I’ve discovered how much can be done in an hour–a filthy garage swept, a disorganized storage room straightened, an overgrown flowerbed weeded, a moldy shower scrubbed—and always after I think, Why didn’t I do this earlier? Why did I put this off for weeks, months, years? (It was a REALLY awful shower.)
I’ve been applying this idea to bigger things: the books I’ve put off writing, the education I neglected to finish, other issues that I don’t feel like confessing here . . . I spend a little time here and there, step away from the TV or the social media and instead do something productive, and every time—every stinking time!—I think, “Everything is so much better now when I do this! Why don’t I do this every day?”
Brigham Young once said that, “we live far beneath our privileges.” I think this partly means we often forget that we can improve many situations we think are unchangeable, that we frequently forget that we’re Children of God who are destined to far greater things than fiddling with mere trifles and wasting precious time.
The interesting thing is, as we fix something small–like a copper bottom pot–we see what great improvements to our mental and emotional health small measures can make, and we start to look for more ways to begin to live up to our privileges. It’s addicting, a natural high. (My kids can tell when I’m really depressed because I’ll get on my hands and knees and scrub a floor. An hour later, it sparkles and my brain is flooded with natural dopamine. Unfortunately for my floors, I’m not frequently that depressed.)
School’s canceled today because of snow. That means I have time to tackle problems that yesterday I thought were unfixable. At the end of the day–at the end of an hour!– everything will seem a little brighter.
Forestedgebooks.com 