Ep14 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

Hoagie gave away the narrator's concert ticket, causing some animosity. They lived on their grandfather's property in Qualicum Beach, with some people living in a house commune and others in a cabin and bus commune. Hoagie fell in love with a French Canadian girl and planned to set up a marijuana plantation in Columbia. However, both Hoagie and his girlfriend died in a bus crash. The narrator still has Hoagie's handmade guitar, but it is broken and not worth fixing. The narrator also discusses the story of David in the Bible and the consequences of his actions. So here we are, episode 14. So last time I was talking about Hoagie and a Moody Blues concert that he gave my ticket away and, you know, a bit of animosity. On my part, I felt cheated. I felt betrayed, cheated. I mentioned when we got to Qualicum and stayed on my grandfather's property, he owned, I think he owned a couple of blocks, undeveloped blocks. He owned other land in Qualicum Beach as well, but between 4th and 5th and 5th and 6th and the, what was then the Island Highway, it went to Port Alberni. He owned those two lots and there was no houses, it was all trees. When Hoagie and I were in California, we picked up this ragtag group of people who followed us up here. I mentioned Peter and I probably would get a really cool story about how I met Peter, but we ended up there on that property. I can't remember if I've told this before or not, but I'm going to quickly go through it. So we lived in a little cabin and mom and Bryce stayed in the cabin and the rest of us kids lived in the bus and there was four bunks in the bus. So we stayed there. I'm pretty sure I already said all that. So they had been looking, my mom and Bryce had been looking for a piece of property to start a commune on and so they found this property, which a lot of the pictures of the mountains that I post and a lot of the pictures that I post were taken on that property. It was called Chicken Crest, which I mentioned before. But another part of the group, which I also probably mentioned, went and lived in a house and so it was like two communes. So in the house commune, Hoagie ended up living in that commune along with a bunch of other people that we had brought up with us, Hoagie and I, that we had met in California and they followed us up here, Morgan and Amy and Pat and they had kids, Ben and Geraldine. So in that time when Hoagie was living at the commune, the group of us that were at the other commune, we stayed in touch. We partied together. We weren't, you know, there wasn't a lot of animosity, but those people weren't invited by my mom and Bryce to live on the farm with us. So I think Hoagie probably could have come there, but anyway, Hoagie ended up meeting this French Canadian girl and she couldn't speak a word of English and he couldn't speak a word of French, but they entered into this relationship where Hoagie and this woman, they were madly in love apparently and Hoagie had, he loved honey. There was a couple of things in life that he loved. He loved honey. He used to like sit down and eat a jar of honey with a spoon kind of a thing. He just loved it. He just loved honey and he loved marijuana and he had this dream of going to Columbia and setting up a marijuana plantation and raising honeybees that would make their honey off of the pot flowers, the marijuana flowers. So I mean, and this girl, I don't know how much she understood, but they ended up taking off for Columbia and he's going to fulfill his dream of raising bees to make honey from the marijuana flowers. Now, by then, I don't know where I, how I was feeling about Hoagie. I think I was pretty, I was okay with him by then, you know, later, you know, I was still 12, but and Hoagie had this, he had one prized possession that he took with him to California when we left Alabama and that was, he had a handmade guitar. It was a 12 string and he was proud of this guitar that he said was built for him by some guy in Florida and my memory of that guitar was that it sounded beautiful, like it had just an amazing sound. Now, if you've heard a 12 string, they have a pretty amazing sound anyway, if they're in tune, but this one did have a deep, you know, Martinesque quality or Gibson, you know, Hummingbird kind of a quality, a deep, deep sound. So when Hoagie left, he left the guitar with me. I don't know if he, I mean, he had other friends, but I think I must have been his closest friend there. I didn't play guitar at the time. I think I may have just been starting to play. The guitar, he had left it fully strung and it broke, the neck broke up by the head, it cracked and then there was two cracks on the face of the guitar. So the guitar wasn't playable, but I was to hold on to it and he was going to come back and get it. He ended up going down to Columbia and him and his girlfriend, they both died in a bus accident, a bus crash in Columbia and that was it. I mean, it was like that quick, Hoagie was gone. I don't know how long he was in Columbia. It doesn't seem like it was that long that he was there, but that's kind of what happened. I don't know how I dealt with that. I honestly don't remember, probably got stoned. In fact, I may have already been a Christian when I found out he was he was dead. I can't remember when exactly it happened and I don't remember exactly, but I do remember later on in my life coming to grips with it. I still have that guitar and at one point my wife took the guitar to a luthier to see if it would be worth fixing and what it would cost to fix it and he said he didn't think it was worth fixing. Now, I had taken it to the guitar center in Victoria, the Folk Center, I think it was called, and I had a guy look at it back in the 80s and he said it looked like it was well worth fixing and he would have done it for free if he didn't have to make a living, but he said it was going to be a lot of work, like in order to do it properly, he wanted to actually take the face off, then he couldn't guarantee the tone. He had a whole bunch of things he wanted to put more bracing underneath so that the split wouldn't come back, the two splits. He said in reality there should be a rod in the neck, there was no rod in the neck of the guitar, so there was a lot of things he wanted to do and he hoped that it would keep the same sound. Anyway, that was in the 80s. I had no resources to do that. In fact, I still have no resources to do that. It's probably $1,000 to fix it, or $1,500 or $2,000. I haven't thrown the guitar out. I can't seem to bring myself to do that. I took the tuning pegs on it, I took them off and I put them on another guitar and I ended up selling that guitar with the Grovers on it, but I still have the other six because it was a 12-string and I only use six of the Grovers. I still have six of these Grovers tuning pegs that I'm attached to them too, so either I'll make my own guitar or I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen with them. So that's that. That's the story of Hoagie. There's some other stuff that I touched on last time too, and one of those things was I talked about David in the Bible and how God put his sin away. The translation that I was thinking of, I read a couple of different translations of the Bible. I read the New American Standard, 1979, I think it is, was it originally done? I can't remember, and it puts it in that term. Also, the English Standard Version puts it in that way. I think it's 2 Samuel 12 where it says God put his sin away. Now, in saying that God put his sin away, I wasn't saying that there were no consequences because there was consequences. There were dire consequences for what David did. His family was destroyed because of what he did. The son that Bathsheba gave birth to because of that adulterous relationship, that son died. David, as soon as the son was born, he realized the baby was sickly and he began to fast. He didn't eat or drink anything. He was in mourning for, again, I think a lot of it had to do with his own sin. I know our culture doesn't like that word, but in reality, all it means is missing the mark. It means to not live up to the live up to the standard that God has set for his people to have relationship with him. If you don't want a relationship with God, then sin means nothing. It's back to the secular point of view, the secular worldview. So anyway, I get sidetracked because I don't know how much people think about this stuff. It's important to me, but it's not important to everybody. So later on, Solomon, who did become the king of Israel after David, was Bathsheba's son through David. Now, and Bathsheba was like David's fifth wife, I think, fourth or fifth, I can't remember. Plus, I said all the concubines he had. But the horrific story is that David's second oldest son, well, first of all, David's daughter got raped by his oldest son, a daughter from a different wife. So a son and a daughter. It's horrific. The stories are horrific. But that's not God. People attribute this to God, but it's not God. This is humanity. This is what humanity is like. So here this half brother is lusting after his half sister, and he seduces her into his room, and then he rapes her. After he rapes her, he's like, you're a piece of garbage. Get out of here. I don't ever want to see you again. He was madly in love with her until he had her. Now, if that doesn't fit for the world we live in today, I don't know what does. I mean, there's so many stories of people I know that live that. They're living that. Anyway, that's another story. So then David basically does nothing. Theoretically, the son should have been put to death. Again, if he was following the laws that God had set down for the people of Israel, that son would have been stoned to death. That was grounds for death, for the death penalty. He did nothing. So the second oldest son, the brother of the girl that was raped, he held it in his heart. He took his sister in. She lived with her brother for the rest of her life, no children, which was shameful for that culture at that time. And he devised a plan, and he ended up years later, I can't remember how many, seven? It's been a while since I read it. I should have read it. The story, it's in 2 Samuel. He has a feast and invites all of his siblings, his half-brothers and half-sisters, and then he murders his older brother, who would have been first in line for the throne. So that's not the end of the story, though. Then he is outcast, and Dave sends him away to his grandfather. Now, it turns out his grandfather is the king of another group of people. So not only has David taken more than one wife, he took a wife from a people that the Israelites were specifically told not to mingle with. So David did a lot of things, and even outside of that, God still granted him forgiveness. I didn't mention, or maybe I did, Psalm 51 was a psalm that David wrote when Nathan told him that he was the ban. That's the story from the last thing. So pick up that psalm and read it and sort of get a glimpse of the heart of David and the heart of God. If you have a hard time understanding it or interpreting it or figuring out what it's saying, send me a message or whatever. I'll try to help you understand. So that brother, years later, came back. He was heartbroken that he couldn't see his dad, his family, or he pretended to be. Anyway, he was brought back, but he couldn't come in and see David. He couldn't come into Jerusalem. So he was at his own house. Eventually, this son, Absalom, he rose up and gathered the people of Israel around him and sought to overthrow David as the king. He was a handsome man. He was big. And so this heartbreaking story where this son rises up and kills confidence of some of the confidants of David. And David flees the city in fear for his life, but he doesn't want to kill his own son. And he's chased by Enes. You know, it's a really kind of a long, it could easily be a movie and probably is a movie. It's a really kind of a long, cool story. In the end, Absalom dies at the hand of the head guy, the commander of David's army. And then David's response to that is wailing and weeping and remorseful, because his son is dead. Now he's lost two sons. His oldest son has been murdered. And now this son's been killed, you know, and David, again, appears to be despising God and his behavior. And God is still looking at David's heart, not so much his actions, his weaknesses, but his heart and how he feels and how he thinks. And how does all that relate? I think ultimately, the secular point of view is, well, let's talk about reason. Let's talk about purpose. So, you know, these deeper questions that people ask, that I ask, and I don't just ask myself, I ask other people, like questions like, why am I here? Like, why was I born? Why is there anything? Why is anybody alive? Why is there a reason for this? Or is there a purpose? Or is it a fluke? So why is there something rather than nothing? I think I've mentioned these questions before. And these are questions that you ask that help you form a worldview. So basically, what you're looking for is reason. The Greek Stoics, you know, early philosophy, sort of pre, even pre-Socrates. Socrates kind of changed everything in the philosophy world. But whatever. The Stoics, they sort of held to a view of their, you know, non-attachment. Like, I think they had a belief, typically, that there was something after life, but, you know, like after death, but not a personal thing, more of a reincorporation into the cosmos or whatever. So that's kind of, you know, there's a lot of Stoicism in the world we live in now. One of the Stoics, I mean, and I quote a lot of people that, you know, I don't agree with everything they say. There's very few people that I would say I agree with everything they say. But Epicitus said, explaining the Stoic position of not, you know, you live your best life, you establish your own reason, basically. But he said, when you kiss your son in the morning, make sure you tell yourself that he's going to die, so you don't become too attached to him, because he is going to die, we're all going to die. Sort of, and that's a Stoic kind of attitude, you know, to keep yourself detached from, and not to think too deeply about things, not to go get involved too deeply. And I have a problem with that. And a Buddhist sort of philosophy is much the same. It's, you know, when you look at the life of Siddhartha, and he abandoned his family and his children, and all in the name of detachment, not being attached. I'm not a Buddhist. So you know, if I got something wrong, I know there's different kinds of Buddhism, but I disagree with that philosophy. I think, you know, the Christian philosophy is much different. It's one where you should be thinking deeply, you should be pursuing knowledge of the highest being that there is the Creator, and pursuing a relationship with that being. And one of the main differences between Christianity and other religions is, is, first of all, reason, there is reason. It's relationship with God. And it's you being personally related and personally engaged in a relationship with the Creator God and Jesus's Son. But we have this example of, like I mentioned last time, of the way that we arrive at mercy is, at God's mercy is through the sacrifice of Jesus, the sinless man, the man that had no reason to die on a cross, that he was unjustly tried, unjustly hung on a cross. And, you know, and there's some spiritual, lots of spiritual implications of that if you, if you research it. And, but he was, he was an all, he was an all round man, he was a, he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. I mean, and again, when you think of a God that is capable of being acquainted with grief, and you have grief in your life, and you have sorrows in your life, it makes it more tangible, more personal. But he has, he wasn't only that he wasn't only a man of sorrows, he was also angry, he, he was an angry man, he was angry at the, the treatment of the house of God, when he turned over the money tables. If you don't know the stories, I can tell you where to find them in the New Testament. He was angry when, when, in fact, in John 11, you have all of the these traits displayed. So people have heard these names, they don't know who they are, they, you know, they see some fiction story made into a movie about Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene, which is, there's no historic evidence for that, but whatever. So that's your view of Mary. Anyway, Lazarus was Mary's brother, and he died, and Jesus was in another town. And when he came, he wept, he wept, when he found out that, that he knew he was dead, but when he found out he was dead, he wept. But not only did he weep, then he got angry. So here's a man that is the creator of life. He's part of the Godhead that created life, that all, if you have life, it came from him. It came from the Godhead. And he's angry at death, because death was never the plan. So he shows anger. So that's another thing, you know, I can relate, relate to. But not only that, he showed by his, by his being the author of life, and then giving himself over to die on a sacrifice, he showed the power over death that is possessed through his righteous sacrifice, he rose from the dead. So again, this is something, there's no other faith, no other legitimate world faith that, that speaks of its leader rising from the dead. And I know of faith that that say, because Jesus rose from the dead, it just shows that he was a rebellious, he was a rebellious teacher, he should never have risen from the dead. He was a miracle that should never have happened, according to these are karmic religions or faiths. So we have this man who is acquainted with sorrows. He's angry. He's risen from the dead. I mean, he died, and he's risen from the dead. And you can look at that and there's not, I don't, I don't know of any other faith that has this character. I have this guitar and it, it reminds me of Hoagie and it reminds me of an era to memories, you know. And I guess, you know, I'm thinking of Absalom and his first, his, the rape of his sister, and then the lack of punishment. And, you know, I can probably every day tell you of ways that I feel like I've, I'm weak, or I've, you know, not done what I need to do to be the godly man that I want to be. But that's part of this whole process of getting to know God, and God getting to know me, and actually becoming a son of God. Like, He adopts us. When we accept the adoption, He adopts us, and we become children of God, and we have all the rights of sons and daughters of God. So, that's hope, you know, and that keeps you going, even though people I love die and leave, and are angry, and perhaps even despise me. I have hope. And if any of this stuff, again, sort of speaks to you, speaks to your heart, tugs on your heart, pokes you a little bit, and you feel so inclined, take it to God in prayer. Be specific about the God you're praying to, I would say, because there's so many, quote-unquote, gods out there. But the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus, because that's where the power is. Because that's where the power is, and He will show, He will reveal Himself, if that's what you're desiring. So, anyway, next time. As I walked beside the mountain, and I let my wonder hide, I saw the fire up on the mountain, and I saw the smoke arise, and I saw the smoke arise. He's gonna save me from this torment. He's gonna save me from myself. He's gonna lead me in the wilderness. He's gonna be my residence. As I look upon the mountain, I see my own eyes, and I'm wandering in this world and hell, and I'm wondering who, where, when, and why. And I fall down on my knees, and I weep my bitter tears, and I wonder what's the meaning of it all to me, when will this hurt disappear? And I close my eyes, and tears still cry, they're mine, they're mine, they're mine, they're mine. And I close my eyes, and tears still cry, they're mine, they're mine, oh. And I gaze around at you, in this hall of illusion, and I see my face in every one of you, and I wonder what's the meaning of it all to me, who am I to wander this earth and wonder about righteousness? Who am I to walk this path, to enter this narrow gate, and wonder about righteousness? And I fall down to my knees, and I cry again, and I rise again, and about all that I've said, about everything that I've done, and to someone else, about every lie I've told, about everything that selfishness gives me, and everything that I would take, that does not belong to me. And I close my eyes, and tears still cry, they're mine, they're mine, they're mine, they're mine. Take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do, take me up, give me all you can do.