Poldering and eternity.
The God of my life (part 4)
After my sixth birthday, Grandpa died quite suddenly of a heart attack. He saw it coming, and of course it was because he was a real child of God. When I was a kid, I wasn't supposed to look at his dead body anymore. I did it anyway, secretly. I had to know for sure, strangely enough, the body was still there, but I could clearly see that Grandpa was also in heaven. Of course, I had no idea what he had given me. It's there to this day. From the past centuries and from eternity. It took me a long time to discover how the Christmas tree was rigged. With lots of balls and garlands. They weren't part of it, but they were also impossible to think away.
We all have our grandfathers and our Miss the Cow. Our baby and toddler years are crucial to our development. And how hard it is to get the balls out of the tree. They've been hanging there our whole lives!
Shortly after Grandpa died, we had a car and bought a house. Got a little weird about that. Don't talk too much about it, don't really cheer! So, apparently, you didn't do that about this kind of thing. Only a lot later did I understand that it was bought from the inherited pennies of Grandpa and you couldn't really be happy with that. Glad, of course, but you don't show that. Money and wealth were not things you could be delighted with anyway. You'd get rich, it'd be even harder to get into heaven. Rich young man, rich man, poor Lazarus, I knew all the stories from the Bible before my eighth birthday. They were told, read out, heard, asked. Knowledge of the Bible was super important. If you're lost, it's your own fault. The people are lost because they have no knowledge. How to reconcile this with the affair that had already been settled in eternity occurred a little less to me. I just wanted to be ten years old, because then you'd be somebody. I learned the difference between city boys and boys in the countryside, in the polder. As a city man, I hit a mud figure in Hendrik Ido Ambacht. I couldn't do anything, was a white man and had no sense of poldering. That was right. I didn't even know what poldering was. That was the reason I never went poldering. Maybe I was wearing the wrong shoes or I had to have money or you had to undress, I don't know. Meanwhile, I did attend a reformatory school, the Willem de Zwijgerschool in H.I. Ambacht. There was also a “School with the Bible”, but there they were wrong. They were reformed or something worse. We had little contact with it. Sometimes a campaign was organized, but most of the time everyone was afraid enough not to let it go on.
#eeuwig #sterven #polder #stadsjongen #geld #erfenis #spiritualiteit #religie #zingeving .
