Why a change of blog name?

After many months of inactivity I have returned to my voxblog looking to do something fresh. One of the delights of Christianity is we get used to being able to start again. So a name change seemed in order.

Why ‘Do not forsake me, o my darling’? A number of reasons - I was noodling around with puns and variations on my name and I remembered Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, perhaps because it is howling a gale here and denuding the trees of branches:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

My surname is Budd and I hope/believe in God’s eyes I am his darling (’loveable or endearing person’ COD). Then I imagined God saying to me, “Don’t forsake me”, along with Jesus’ cry of dereliction in the other direction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) and I thought about the wrestling of faith in the face of trials and such.

Finally, and rather frivolously, Do not forsake me O my Darling is not only a good song from the classic western, High Noon, it also is the title of an episode of The Prisoner (a series I’ve been fond of for many years). Strangely though, it is not the cowboy episode which was called Living in Harmony, and which followed it in the series. Enough for now.