Ramparts are defensive walls to fortify.  I know this because I like words and I see one and, even when I know what it means, I look to find the next layer; to squeeze out of it all that I can to make the word picture in my mind come alive. I want to taste the word in my heart. I took my Bible out to the ballfield at school like always this morning and it held me captive, this idea of considering well.  Considering something can be done well and when I do, it feeds me.  I like the thought.

“Walk about Zion,” Psalm 48 tells me….”go round about her.”  Zion is heaven, Zion is us.  Zion is all things God.  And He wants me to consider it.  But this is why.  “So that you may tell the next generation.”  I look again at my tamarisk tree inked on my wrist, the constant reminder of who He is and the very purpose I had for wanting it there. It  reminds me to consider. If I think I don’t have a reason for being?  This is it.  To remember and to tell those behind me.  He’s here.  He’s everywhere.  He’s constant.  And He is so “even until death”.  I felt the presence of death this weekend; that it’s real.  It will happen.  It does happen.  And while we cry, we know He IS.  Still.

But this.  This is what really grabbed me.  This line….”Consider well her ramparts….that you may tell the next generation….and cease recalling disappointments.”  There is the hard thing. The bittersweet thing.  The best thing.  The thing that sets us free to move forward and seize that He is.

I want to consider well.  Because I want to be free to remember and to live in the land of the living today, waving the rampart flag.