Real🕊

Biblical wisdom in cinematic stories.
New Eyes series in highlights

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

The light went down behind them as they drove, and somewhere in that going-down , that exact, unmarked minute when the sun touches the sea and the day they call Friday becomes the day the Most High set apart , the week ended for Samson. He did not need a clock. He had learned to feel it the way a man feels a room go quiet. The sky over Kingston turned the colour of the inside of a shell, pink folding into grey, and the Sabbath came in over the harbour the way it always came: without permission, without announcement, asking nothing of the city.
Ruth felt it too, but differently.

She had come up in a church that gathered on the first day, in white blouses and good shoes, in the warm certainty of a congregation that had never once thought to ask which day the commandment meant. Sunday was the day the Most High was praised; this she had known before she knew her own name. And now she had married a man who loved the Most High and his Son, and had gone and read the law for himself , no denomination over him, no pastor standing between him and the page ,and had decided, quietly, the way Samson decided everything, that all of it was to be kept. All of it. Including the one about the seventh day.
It was a beautiful thing to watch in him. It was an expensive thing to live beside.
Because Friday evening and Saturday were not ordinary days at the salon. They were the days. The wedding days, the church-tomorrow days, the days the chairs never emptied and the money came in thick and easy , the two days that carried the other five. And Ruth had begun, slowly, with a heaviness she did not fully show him, to fold those days away. Not all at once. A Saturday here. A Friday evening there. The most that she could give. She still left him most Saturday mornings ,still went down to the shop while he stayed home in the rest he had chosen .

The gym had bent for Samson the way the world sometimes bends for a man who does not argue. They let him keep the day. They paid him for what he worked and not for what he believed, which is to say they paid him less, and he had taken the less the way he took the whole patchwork of his obedient life , as the visible cost of an invisible thing. He never called it sacrifice. That, perhaps, was what made it one.
He did not drive straight home. Near the bottom of the city, where the road runs down to meet the water, there is a place the cars go in the evenings and sit in a long quiet row facing the sea , a drive-in with no screen, where the harbour itself is the picture. He turned in among them, cut the engine, and the night came up around the glass.
The harbour lay out flat and black and shining. Across it the hills ran long and low along the far shore, a darker dark against the sky, and over all of it the moon had laid its one straight road of silver on the water , going nowhere, leading everywhere. He took her hand. Her fingers were tired from the day. He held them anyway.
For a while they only talked the small talk of people who have stopped needing the big kind. The price of things. A cousin's foolishness. Then, because it had been on him for months now, he asked her again ,gently, as if for the first time , how many children she wanted.
"Three," she said. She did not even pause. "Three."
He smiled at the windscreen.
"The view pretty, though," she said after a moment, looking out. "I love the water." And then, lower, with the small private honesty she only ever gave him in the dark: "Just not when it turn that dark blue. When it go dark blue I don't like it."
He let that sit. He understood it without quite understanding it. Then, carefully , because he had learned that some doors must be only touched, not opened ,he said, "You ever think you could work from home? When the children come."
She moved her eyes from the water to her own hands. "Sometimes," she said slowly, "I don't even want to be at the salon at all." And that was as far as it went. It hung there between them, too large for a Friday night , a thing they both knew would have to be sat down with properly one day, weighed, planned for, prayed over, when the time was right. Not now. Now was not for solving.
So they let it go, and let the night have them. The waves came in soft against the wall below. A car door somewhere. The far hum of the sleepless city behind. The moon held its silver road steady on the harbour, and the two of them sat in the bought-back quiet of the day he had chosen and she was learning to choose, hands folded together over the gap between the seats , until it was time, at last, to go home.

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

The light went down behind them as they drove, and somewhere in that going-down , that exact, unmarked minute when the sun touches the sea and the day they call Friday becomes the day the Most High set apart , the week ended for Samson. He did not need a clock. He had learned to feel it the way a man feels a room go quiet. The sky over Kingston turned the colour of the inside of a shell, pink folding into grey, and the Sabbath came in over the harbour the way it always came: without permission, without announcement, asking nothing of the city.
Ruth felt it too, but differently.

She had come up in a church that gathered on the first day, in white blouses and good shoes, in the warm certainty of a congregation that had never once thought to ask which day the commandment meant. Sunday was the day the Most High was praised; this she had known before she knew her own name. And now she had married a man who loved the Most High and his Son, and had gone and read the law for himself , no denomination over him, no pastor standing between him and the page ,and had decided, quietly, the way Samson decided everything, that all of it was to be kept. All of it. Including the one about the seventh day.
It was a beautiful thing to watch in him. It was an expensive thing to live beside.
Because Friday evening and Saturday were not ordinary days at the salon. They were the days. The wedding days, the church-tomorrow days, the days the chairs never emptied and the money came in thick and easy , the two days that carried the other five. And Ruth had begun, slowly, with a heaviness she did not fully show him, to fold those days away. Not all at once. A Saturday here. A Friday evening there. The most that she could give. She still left him most Saturday mornings ,still went down to the shop while he stayed home in the rest he had chosen .

The gym had bent for Samson the way the world sometimes bends for a man who does not argue. They let him keep the day. They paid him for what he worked and not for what he believed, which is to say they paid him less, and he had taken the less the way he took the whole patchwork of his obedient life , as the visible cost of an invisible thing. He never called it sacrifice. That, perhaps, was what made it one.
He did not drive straight home. Near the bottom of the city, where the road runs down to meet the water, there is a place the cars go in the evenings and sit in a long quiet row facing the sea , a drive-in with no screen, where the harbour itself is the picture. He turned in among them, cut the engine, and the night came up around the glass.
The harbour lay out flat and black and shining. Across it the hills ran long and low along the far shore, a darker dark against the sky, and over all of it the moon had laid its one straight road of silver on the water , going nowhere, leading everywhere. He took her hand. Her fingers were tired from the day. He held them anyway.
For a while they only talked the small talk of people who have stopped needing the big kind. The price of things. A cousin's foolishness. Then, because it had been on him for months now, he asked her again ,gently, as if for the first time , how many children she wanted.
"Three," she said. She did not even pause. "Three."
He smiled at the windscreen.
"The view pretty, though," she said after a moment, looking out. "I love the water." And then, lower, with the small private honesty she only ever gave him in the dark: "Just not when it turn that dark blue. When it go dark blue I don't like it."
He let that sit. He understood it without quite understanding it. Then, carefully , because he had learned that some doors must be only touched, not opened ,he said, "You ever think you could work from home? When the children come."
She moved her eyes from the water to her own hands. "Sometimes," she said slowly, "I don't even want to be at the salon at all." And that was as far as it went. It hung there between them, too large for a Friday night , a thing they both knew would have to be sat down with properly one day, weighed, planned for, prayed over, when the time was right. Not now. Now was not for solving.
So they let it go, and let the night have them. The waves came in soft against the wall below. A car door somewhere. The far hum of the sleepless city behind. The moon held its silver road steady on the harbour, and the two of them sat in the bought-back quiet of the day he had chosen and she was learning to choose, hands folded together over the gap between the seats , until it was time, at last, to go home.

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

New Eyes.

The car smelled like her, coconut oil and the faint chemical sweetness of relaxer that never quite washed off her hands. It was the smell of nine hours on her feet, of other women's heads built and blessed while her own went uncombed. To Samson it had always smelled like home. Tonight he barely noticed it.
He pulled up outside the salon at 7:14. He always came at 7. She was always late. He never complained, fourteen minutes in a quiet car was nothing next to the years he'd promised her. He watched the salon door through the windshield and waited, engine humming low beneath him like something patient, her empty seat beside him.

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

The room had to be bright, and so the room was bright and because the room was bright, Roger wore the patch.
That was the order of things. The aerobics class needed the lights up full, every panel burning, the kind of hard white that leaves no shadow anywhere, and hard white light in his left eye meant the slow hammer of a migraine starting behind it , a souvenir of an accident some years back that had rewired something in there, made brightness a problem that darkness could solve. So the patch went on when the lamps came up, and came off when they went down. Black, neat, worn over the left only. A practical thing. A medical thing. Except that nothing Roger wore stayed merely practical for long. He had turned even that into something. Of course he had. On Roger the patch did not read as injury. It read as character. A flaw arranged into an asset, which was, when you came to think of it, the whole architecture of the man.
He moved at the front of the room like water that knew it was being watched. Six feet, thirty three, built the way the gym sold as a promise to everyone who walked through its doors. The class followed him , twenty bodies in rows, reaching when he reached, breathing when he breathed , and Roger counted them out in that warm carrying voice and let his one good eye travel the room.
It found her in the front row.
New. He could always tell the new ones. And more than new , the right kind of new. Not young. Not broke. A woman in her fifties with money in the cut of her plain expensive clothes and a softness around the eyes that said she had recently been disappointed by something, or someone, and had come here to feel strong again. Roger smiled at her. Just a degree more than he smiled at the rest. Just enough warmth that she would carry it home and not quite know why the class had felt different. He held her eyes for the length of one breath and then released them, and turned the smile back to the room, and the woman in the third row reached a little higher than she had before.
Across the floor, by the weight rack, Samson watched the whole transaction and laughed.

It came up out of him before he could stop it, not a loud laugh, but close, a chuckle that nearly broke the surface, the helpless amusement of a man who has watched his friend run the same play so many times he can call it before it starts. He knew Roger. He knew exactly what that extra degree of smile meant, knew the woman in the third row was already, without her knowledge, entered into a ledger.
When the class ended and the studio emptied, the two men drifted together near the back wall in the easy way of coworkers who actually like each other, and Roger caught the look still sitting on Samson's face.
"What," Roger said, grinning. "What you laughing at."
"You know what."
"The lady?" Roger spread his hands, all innocence. "The lady is a client. I am providing a service."
Samson shook his head, smiling.
And here Roger settled into it, because this was his favourite sermon and Samson his favourite congregation of one. He spoke the way men like him have always spoken , reasonably, warmly, with the absolute confidence of someone who has never once suspected he might be wrong. Life was short, he said. Look how short. A man works his whole life and then what. Roger took what was offered. The tips, the gifts, the watches some of these women put on his wrist just to feel young for an afternoon , and yes, the rest of it too, when the price was right, and he did not trouble himself overmuch about whether there was a ring on the hand writing the cheque. That was their conscience, not his. He had a son in America he had never short-changed a dollar. He drove a G-Wagon the colour of arterial blood. He was, by every measure he respected, winning.
"You," he said, jabbing a finger at Samson, almost fond, "are a one burner."
"A one burner."
"One woman. One pot on one fire. The whole big stove and you cooking on one burner." He laughed at his own image. "Man, the stove have four. Life short. Get the most out of it. Fun. Pleasure. While the body still working." He gestured down at himself, the proof of the philosophy. "When we dead, we dead."

Samson let him finish. He always let Roger finish; there was no winning a race against that mouth and he had stopped trying years ago. And when the silence came he did not fill it with argument. He filled it with something quieter and harder to laugh off.
He said he was fine on his one burner. He said it without heat, the way a man states a fact he has already tested with his whole life. The money would come and go, he said. The women Roger spoke of would come and go faster. And none of it , not the tips, not the watches, not the bodies in the bright studio , none of it could fill the particular space it was pretending to fill. Because that space was not built for fun. It was built for love. For the one who knew the worst of you and stayed. The one in front of whom you did not have to perform, did not have to be the strong young man holding up someone's disappointed afternoon ,could just be yourself, tired and ordinary and known, and be loved anyway, for nothing, for free, for being.
"You can buy plenty," Samson said. "You cyaan buy that. And when yuh have it — " he shrugged " — yuh stop wanting the other thing. The hunger just gone."
For half a second something moved behind Roger's one good eye. Something the grin did not cover. Then it was gone, sealed over, because men like Roger do not stay long in rooms that ask them real questions.
He laughed it off. He clapped Samson on the shoulder and called him a preacher and told him he was wasting good sermons in a gym. And right on cue , the timing almost cruel, almost arranged by some hand neither of them could see , a voice called across the empty studio.
"Roger." The woman from the front row, or one just like her, fifty something and beautifully kept, leaning in the doorway with a knowing softness. "It's time for my stretch."
Roger's whole face changed back into the thing it sold. "Duty calls," he said to Samson, already turning, already gone, the half smile sliding back on like the patch over his eye. "We talk later."
And he crossed the bright floor toward the waiting woman, and Samson stood a moment by the wall and watched him go , not with envy, never that, but with the small private sadness of a man watching a friend walk back into a house with no one home in it.
Outside, the evening had come down soft over the city. Somewhere a black Honda was already turning toward a salon to collect a woman who loved the man behind the wheel for nothing, for free, for being.

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"But a man who commits adultery has no sense; whoever does so destroys himself. Blows and disgrace are his lot, and his shame will never be wiped away."Proverbs 6:32-33

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

Stop trusting in mere humans, who have but a breath in their nostrils. Why hold them in esteem?: Isaiah 2:22

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

The medicine coming up out of the ground

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." Revelation 22:2
"They will bear fruit every month, because their water flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for medicine." Ezekiel 47:12

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." Revelation 22:2
"They will bear fruit every month, because their water flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for medicine." Ezekiel 47:12

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." Romans 8:28

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

@herchosenpath Rome vibes

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

@justa876man Water should be free

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

@suespeaksup @TRobinsonNewEra @daveatherton London Bridge.....

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

Life is so fragile

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If Yah wills, we will live and do this or that.'" James 4: 14-15

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If Yah wills, we will live and do this or that.'" James 4: 14-15

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

@Telegraph Glad it's getting fair attention even tho it's all smoke and mirrors, the sheep are still being led in the direction they want.

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

Priorities

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

Your up

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." 1 John 2:15-16

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." 1 John 2:15-16

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

@TaraBull Thanks for caring

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of Yahuah endureth for ever." 1Peter 1:24-25

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

A word to the wise

[Real🕊 @RealRenk]

Proverbs 1 verse 10-19. My son, if sinful men entice you, do not give in to them. If they say, “Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for innocent blood, let’s ambush some harmless soul; let’s swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder; cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”— my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths; for their feet rush into evil, they are swift to shed blood. How useless to spread a net where every bird can see it! These men lie in wait for their own blood; they ambush only themselves! Such are the paths of all who go after ill-gotten gain; it takes away the life of those who get it.