Charles is an excellent comic strip reader. He makes sound effects and gesticulates, pulls faces and mimics voices as he reads to me while I knit. Now that Thomasville Times comes by mail, often there are two papers on the same day, then a dearth of comics for several days. So it’s feast or famine when it comes to comics. We have our favorites. Family Circus, Zits, and Born Loser are at the top of the list, although who couldn’t pick Beetle Bailey or Blondie? Sometimes a line he reads is so profound I tuck it in my brain to mull over. Like this one from Family Circus.
Two children are at the bottom of a snowy hill where the little girl has taken a spill off the sled. She’s bawling crocodile tears. Her brother says “No need to cry. Mama can’t hear you this far away.”
It struck me at the time Charles read and described this scenario that often we, too, suffer a downfall of some kind when there’s no one near to hear our cries. We might as well listen to the voice of reason and just hush because no one is listening.
But this was my next thought. We are never so far away that God can’t hear us. In the middle of the night when worries take over, on a bleak forsaken trail, at “the end of our rope,” God is there. When we face a “horrible, no good, very bad day,” God is there. When life throws us a curve and the skies are all gray, God is only a prayer away.
As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 139:9-10, If I take the wings of morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
In the words of Corrie ten Boom, “There is no pit so deep that God is not there.”
Pens and Needles 
I can just hear him reading those comics!!!