"Funny how time slips away"- Willie Nelson

I asked a friend if I could borrow his projector to photograph old slides and put them on the wall. I was excited at seeing events and places in my life from 20-40 years ago but what I had forgotten, slides deteriorate. The colours fade and what was sharp vibrant colour at the time, seems so bland and empty now. The sparkle the colour had gone, things had moved on "funny how time slips away."
I took the photo of Charles Lindbergh's 'Spirit of St Louis' in 1992 .I can still see it in the Smithsonian in Washington .It was a great achievement and in the film James Stewart gave a good performance of trying to stay awake. That was a long time ago and my photo of the plane had gone the way of the others.
In my time travel books The Scent of Time and The Scent of Home, the characters travel in time.
They go back to Gettysburg in 1863 when it was all too vibrant and Virginia in 1759 where it looks as though they might be stuck there . I some times think it would be nice to go with them.
As much as I enjoy time travel and writing about it and I hope people enjoy reading about it .You cannot live in the past .It is a shadow because God is not there.  He has left and when He leaves there is only the shadow of what was. He also lives in the present because He helps us to get to the future.. Maybe it would have been nice to live in 1759 -till the first time you needed a dentist .Or live in 1863 till you found you had diabetes. Lo said Jesus I am with you always even unto the end of the age. "Funny how time slips away."   

The Eye of the Beholder

 

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yet how often do we miss what is beautiful around us? We look at the pictures of film stars, perfectly exposed and air brushed -yet in real life they look a lot rougher than they appear in their perfect photographs. Maybe the exception to that rule was the late Audrey Hepburn, witness her popularity on fashion accessories even today.
How often do we miss what is before us because we have become used to it?
I spent 11 years in a beautiful glen in Perthshire called Glenshee .It was stunning scenery but by 11 years we had got used to it.
Then we moved to my next parish and when we got to the manse there, there were boards over the window to protect the glass. We looked through cracks and at the time on the TV there were scenes from Kosovo with houses boarded up just like ours. Day after day we thought of the lovely walk in the hills we had left and the scenery, to move to this? In the end we were able to see the beauty in our new place, a lot of which was in the people and the joy of it having a cricket team.
The picture above is like something out of the Beatles Sgt Pepper Album in fact it is oil on a pavement but if it is dealt with the right way and caught in the right light it can turn into something beautiful - bit like the way God looks at us.