Looking For The Long Ride

This afternoon I find myself face to face with an interesting dilemma—how to move forward in my journey and remain true to myself and at the same time true to finding an authentic expression of Christianity.

At this point in my life I hardly consider myself to be postmodern in the sense of reacting to and wanting to re-shape everything that I have considered to be foundational in my Christian life. Nor do I consider that I am part of the “Emergent” church movement which is more or less defined by Wikipedia as:

“The emerging church is a controversial 21st-century Protestant Christian movement whose participants seek to engage postmodern people, especially the unchurched and post-churched. To accomplish this, “emerging Christians” seek to deconstruct and reconstruct
Christian beliefs, standards, and methods to fit in the postmodern
mold. Proponents of this movement call it a “conversation” to emphasize
its developing and decentralized nature.”

I don’t know who wrote that but it is a hat-full.

Truthfully, I am just a guy on a journey who has jumped (or was I pushed) off the fast train of life and looking for the beginnings of what I believe and why.

What I do know is that each and every church and home church in America believes that it is teaching and following the word of God and that the body of Christ is made up of individuals from each of these local expressions of Christianity. And yes, I even believe that Catholics are a part of the mix as well.

In Donald Miller’s Searching For God Knows What he speculates about what a alien would think about us if they happened to land on our planet. His first impression is that they would wonder why we compare ourselves to one another—why we need the approval of someone else to make us feel alright. The aliens might wonder about all the fuss over sports events: “You mean the only purpose of game of basketball is to see who has the better team and that is accomplished by scoring more points?” I almost think I see “their” point.

Last night I ran a little off the centerline with his thought and wondered—in light of my recent ponderings about the church, etc.—what a person might come out of the woods with if sent into the forest with only a Bible to read. This person would have no knowledge of scripture or traditions of Christianity upon receiveing the bible and food for a couple of months. They would be directed to a cabin in aforementioned woods and asked to read the bible and upon completion would be debriefed about their impressions and understandings of said book.

We might then ask him or her questions about what the “church” is supposed to look like and whether or not women are allowed to be pastors. Just a few of the more front burner issues that face us today.

I guess one of my questions of myself at this point, having been on this journey for some time now, is how to keep alive what we strongly believe and yet really love others who may believe much differently than we.

Scripture tells me that without faith it is impossible to please God and that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. It is by faith that I beleive that God created the heavens and the earth and how He did it and whether or not it took place in an actual 7 day period really is not the issue for me. I can’t literally prove that He did it because I wasn’t there at the time. But I believe the Bible is the word of God and it says He did and that’s the end of the story for me on that one.

What I do know is that when my firstborn came into the world it was a marvelous thing. I remember as if it was yesterday having the thought as to what kind of God it was that created us in the sense that the cells that formed her fingernails could tell the difference between the cells that formed her finger. She was one big baby with paper thin skin stretched over her ears.

Back to the person who just returned from two or three months in the woods reading the bible. What would they have to tell us about the creation and the flood and Isaiah’s prophesies? What about Samson and Deborah and Ruth?

Or does any of that really matter? I think it does but am still in process as to the best way to get to where I am heading.

I am going to keep reading and keep asking the hard questions and keep an eye on how I got to where I find myself today. I am not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater or quit believing that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born just because Paul doesn’t reference it in his writings. Like I said recently—it is scary out there—make sure your tires are pumped up and the wheels are on tight. Once we climb this mountain the ride down the other side is bound to be fast and a lot of fun.

Several weeks ago I mentioned the bible story of the two sons who were both asked to go into the vineyards to work and their initial responses and subsequent actions.

I identified with the son who said no at first and then thought better of his response and then did what was asked of him—I saw in him and me a “reluctance” which is a pull between a sense of duty and responsibility.

To that end I secured a website called www.reluctantservant.com and set up a blog with the intention of making it more a spiritual topics place than looking for the long ride. I posted two entries and have realized that they are in a sense part of the sequential nature of what I have been writing the past week or so.

They were posted on 6/13 and 6/19 and seem to follow the 6/12 post here entitled Pathos or Bathos – Jot or Tittle. It remains to be seen if having two different blogs is a good idea or not. I like the look and feel of the reluctant servant one but really don’t think I have the time or the inspiration to hold two together.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

I have lately become aware of the many metaphors that we use to describe our lives and also our interpretation of scripture. And I must admit with a certain amount of chagrin that I have been a person who has read books and scripture looking for recipes and formulas to follow that will ensure my success.

My question today is what formula or recipes are we trying to follow as it pertains to our understanding of the Bible that in turn have kept us from a relationship with God through Jesus.

I must say before I begin to open up this thought that I have personally turned a corner in my life after having been in somewhat of a lull/holding pattern following my departure from a church I had been a part of for 22 years. There was a time after leaving when all I could do at night was sit in my chair and wait for the tv to light up—I didn’t have the energy to read or draw or even write very well—though I kept trying to figure things out in order to feel alive.

I have tried to leave the blame for what happened in that church behind me and am not currently involved in thinking about it to much any more. Not that I am fully free from the ramifications of leaving—just that I am no longer consumed by them or by trying to figure it all out.

Most of what I learned from that church was that within Christianity as “we” understood it, even at its most basic level, there was a formula for everything—even to having a relationship with God. It was a basic formula: Get up in the morning and have an extended quiet time with God by praying and reading the word; attend the various gatherings of the church; give your time/tithe and talent to the local body and have a date night with your wife and everything would be fine as wine (this is from a husband’s perspective).

When you fell off the “works” wagon you were expected to get back on it as soon as possible and from that point on I can’t really remember what was required except for living with the feeling that I wasn’t measuring up with whatever it was for the last ten years that I attended. I am trying to be positive here—but I try to call it the way that I see it.

A formula or recipe can best be described as a: procedure to be followed or any fixed or conventional method of doing something—which in and of itself is not a bad thing. But when the procedure itself leads you to a place of thinking that you have something which you don’t, there most certainly is a problem.

In other words, having a relationship with Jesus is a lot more than just following a group of exercises or motions designed to facilitate our human understanding of what this means or otherwise fullfilling a biblical mandate. I am not sure at this time that I completely understand what it means to be a Christian—a follower of Christ—but I am on the trail and know that one day I will be one. Not that I am not one presently—but you know what I mean—I don’t feel fully engaged, captivated or otherwise fully functioning in that role at present.

I guess the bottom line is that we are taught that by believeing whatever it is that the church we attend believes we are in like flynn and in the process of building our house on the rock. Pre-trib, mid-trib or post-trib and all that. What about no trib at all and what does any of that have to do with anything in the meantime.

Wikipedia has at least 33 Christian movements listed on the first page of my google search: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_movements#Religious) which begins with the 24/7 prayer movement and ends with the weak theology movement. I am literally amazed at what there is out there!

And though each of these movements may share some similarities, they all have a definate idea of the way things shoud work and the formulas for how a person is to get to wherever it is that each says we need to go.

Back in the day we had to have special speakers come into the church in order to let us know that God still loved us even though we didn’t read our bibles every day. Then John Eldridge said basically the same thing in one of his books and is now doing alright for himself as an author. I used to think that smoking an occasional cigar and having a relationship with God was mutually exclusive—you can’t have them both. Not that smoking a cigar is something that we should aspire to but my thought was that when I smoked a cigar I was in reality telling God to go someplace else for about a half an hour and I would get back to him when I was finished. He may or may not approve of my choice but I have come to understand that if Jonah couldn’t get away from God in the belly of a whale, He is probably not going anywhere when I light up from time to time.

To that end I have taken to inviting Him along when I take a bike ride—yes I still pray out loud for protection and that He would cover my trip with His angels—who wants to fall off a bike at thrity miles a hour—but it is more a beginning of an understanding that He is there anyway—so I might just as well take full advantage of the moment. If He wants to speak to me in that time I am open to it and I believe that I have my ears and heart open.

I guess it boils down to understanding that God accepts us and then accepting ourselves in the process of becoming whatever it is we were created to become. Yes we need to read the bible and pray and look for opportunities to serve but all that should be generated from a heart engaged in a relationship with the creator of the universe and not as a method to get anyone’s favor or to gain some points that we can cash in when we get to heaven.

I suspect that other poeple have said what I have just tried to verbalize in more understandiable and concise terms—but this is the ride that I am on today—tomorrow I will know more and love more.

But today has enough stuff going on as it is.

I will have to admit it: I am a big-time book junkie who has been on standby for far to long. I don’t know exactly what it is about books that I am most attracted to either—is it their potential for revelation and escape or simply the smell of the pages as they flip slowly beneath my thumb and forefinger.

One of my favorite past times is to browse through a big book store in search of the perfect title—the one that will finally tell me everything I have always wanted to know and then some. I exagerate but just by a little bit. It is exciting to find a book that says “read me” and then follows through on its promise.

Also—it is summertime and the tv is lousy—what with repeats of last season’s stuff or the bottomless pit of song and dance reality shows and superficial summer mini-series broadcasts.

It is book-time in America and that is alright with me.

I am currently surfing between books about re-discovering authentic Christianity and poetry that I am finding on my own and some that have been recomended to me. Like the other day I was in Black Bear Books, a local bookstore/coffee shop/wi-fi stop on one of our town’s main drags. I happened to mention a book of poems I had just read and of course the helpful clerk behind the counter told me of another book that she had read by a relatively unknown poet Darnell Arnoult. Arnoult is a women who currently lives on a small farm outside Nashville, Tennessee—having lived in Virginia and done a stint in my own North Carolina.

I found the book titled What Travels With Us on the shelf and suffice it to say was taken in by her words almost immediately. She writes with a distinct southern drawl and sensibility that I have never encountered except for those few times I have wandered off the beaten path in and around the counties I live closest to in the Appalachian mountains of the same North Carolina. It is a book you could read from cover to cover but often need to pause for a time to refect on the simplicity and shear complexity of her poetic paintings of a world that not many have the fortune to touch or come close to.

In a poem entitled Springhouse she packs a few years into a few well turned sentences that leave you filling in the blanks almost without thinking.

Buck Waller saw a
surveyor marking bounaries
at daybreak. Made Buck
right curious. Come next year ole
Buck jumped to a mill whistle.

Ma, she spun and spun
till she spun herself white.
She spun herself plumb fuzzy,
a dust mote on the mill floor.
Come one day, she floated off.

And that is just one small poem in a book that turns out to be a little to short but long enough to think about your own life and how it is broken down into little pieces of poems that generally get discarded in the process of getting ready for the next day.

One of those moments came my way as I was sitting in my easy chair in the living room of my house and letting the evening swirl around me like a cool breeze. And I wrote:

As the ceiling fan
stirrred the June air
above our heads, my youngest
daughter asked me how much
money I spent on feeding
the birds.

It is almost never a nice
thing to think about
the money we spend
on our hobbies
I thought.

I guess I should maybe think about my own book one day.

In a book I am reading by Donald Miller called Looking For God Knows What, Miller says that, “…poetry is a literary tool that has the power to give a person the feeling he or she isn’t alone in their feelings and emotions, that, though there are no words to describe them, somebody understands.”

And I have to say a hearty Amen to that.

I guess the question which begs to be asked at this point is are we ready to live our lives as if they really count for something—if what we have relegated to the hum drum of life isn’t just a little bit more exciting than we have ever allowed ourselves to imagine.

If, as I believe, God is everywhere and we are currently surrounded by the molecules that make up this earth and our own substance—why can’t we begin to see the poetry and painting and song that lies just beneath the surface of who we claim to be and those we come in contact with.

Enjoy your ride.

Having just finished Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis I must say there are several observations he makes in his book that I have pondered over the past several days.

One of them is a picture of a missionary “taking Jesus” to a people who don’t know about Him—and the common belief that God is absent from a certain place until they take Him to them. I must admit that that is exactly what I have thought, more or less all these years until reading what he had to say next. He said and I quote, “So the issue isn’t so much taking Jesus to people who don’t have Him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people there the creative, life-giving God who is already in their midst.” More like a tour guide than a missionary per se is what we are left with in his opinion.

In tandem with this thought is the idea that God is everywhere because if He wasn’t somewhere then that place wouldn’t even exist. So we simply show people who don’t know about God how to see Him wherever they are. Makes a lot of sense to me.

And this thought opened up several which I pondered for a time the other day. When someone opens up my mind to see something new and I start to make my own connections and feel the flow of creativity, I am sort of like a kid in a candy shop—I can’t wait to tell everyone I see about the journey and how exciting it is. Everything I am at that point is wrapped up in what I am thinking about the present reality that I find myself experiencing. It is new wine and would probably be better if shared after it had matured, but I guess the way I am wired is that if the present is under the tree it might just as well be opened.

My thoughts that day went like this: If God is everywhere and we are always in His presence, then what is He saying to us at any given moment and if this is true what else is all around us that we are missing out on by not being aware if its presence either. It is kinda of like the picture of the rose always being there but in our hurry not taking the time to look at it. Georgia O’Keefe said this about why she painted really big pictures of flowers:

So I said
to myself, I’ll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big
and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even
busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

So, as an artist, Georgia O’Keefe is like a visual tour guide showing us, who are often to busy to stop and look at and smell the roses, what they really look like up close and personal.

As a missionary then, our job as tour guide would be to show the people around us, what Romans 1:20 tells us is clearly there: For since the creation of the world God’s invisible
qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made, so that men are without
excuse.

I guess you can begin to see where I was taking all of this. What are we missing by not being aware of all the stuff that is unseen and going on all around us. Not that we can be fully alive in every moment gleaning each and every kernal there is to glean from life (why can’t we be?).

In thinking this way I began to arrive at the conclusion that perhaps we have shut ourselves off to a lot of the stuff that is pure potential around us by being so task oriented in how we process our lives. What are we not seeing in each and every moment that we are awake and interacting with people. What is the travelogue going on all around us that we could tune into and by listening become fully alive and authentic people in the process.

It is like God is always broadcasting but much of the time we are tuned to another channel or have the radio off altogether.

I know this seems idealistic—we can’t really quit doing our jobs and become like bees pollenating every flower that we see—but maybe we can start by being more aware of the space around us and the people that we come into contact on a daily basis. Maybe our job is to make a difference in their lives by simply listening to their story and affirming their value as people—that’s a good place to start. Who knows but that we might find those people that we pass everyday may have something of value to give to us as well.

It is like the man used to say on television years ago before a certain crime drama—the naked city has 8 million stories and this is one of them.

Enjoy the flowers in your life.

I have once again become aware of the fact that in our search for truth and meaning about our Christian faith or world view—we will indeed bump into some thoughts that are not popular and yes even some stuff that is not true.

I was told at one time that Corrie Ten Boom said that reading Christian books was like eating fish in the sense that you had to remove the meat from the bones. I googled it this morning and couldn’t find it but the thought remains—these are perilous times that we live in and we have to be careful to not be taken in by false beliefs and doctrines in our search for truth and meaning.

In a book I am currently reading entitled “Velvet Elvis” by Rob Bell, he states that whether or not one believes in a literal 7 day creation event or simply sees this as metaphor has nothing to do with the ulitmate truth that God created the world and all that is in it. And trying to fit the dinosaurs into all of this and not being able to figure it all out has not made me any less convinced that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. There are mysteries all around us.

However, Rob does begin to push things a little to far when he suggests that if the virgin birth is not what we  traditionally have  thought it to be—if Christ had a earthly DNA father—that this would not affect the rest of our historic Christian doctrines. He likens this to be just one of the springs that holds the trampoline together (his analogy) and not the trampoline itself (God created the heavens and earth and all that stuff). Two paragraphs later he makes the statement that he affirms the historic Christian faith, the virgin birth, the trinity and the inspiration of the bible and so forth.

The point I believe he is trying to make is that some things we believe or ascribe to are flexible and others are not and that since God is real and Jesus is real, one piece of the whole can be removed or thought of differently and that would not change the whole. I don’t think the virgin birth is one of those pieces that can be thought of differently but I can finish reading the book without too much hesitation or the feeling that I am falling into heresy by doing so.

But this does bring up a good point—there are many out there in blogland who feel that Rob Bell has gone to far as well as Rick Warren (Purpose Driven Church) and others. Follow the right links and you can get every type of opinion and read about stuff that you were not even aware that has been going on for years and years.

My bible tells me that if I am seeking God and begin to stray that a voice behind me will direct me toward the truth—so I will not be fearful about investigating some of what is out there that pertains to me looking at the church and what it is doing in a different light. I guess the question is should I not talk about the trip until I finally reach the safety of total comprehension and understanding of all that I have sought after? Or put a warning label on all posts that include references to books that I am only part way through?

The point is that I believe that Jesus died on the cross for far more than most of us are living today and that the church has actually hindered many of us from even reaching the low bar on the exercise equipment of an examined life.

I believe the first statement in the Westminster Catechism is where we should all be heading and that is:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?

A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God,[1] and to enjoy him forever.[2]

And we can do this in a more satisfying way if we take the time to discover what it is we really believe in rather than just mouth the words that have assembled themselves in our minds over the years of liistening to sermon after sermon.

All mysteries have a certain amount of danger associated with them. Paul was certainly no stranger to danger as he talked with his peers about what he knew of Christ. But it is the glory of kings to uncover the truths that are out there to be found.

So I will not be so quick to tell you that I have found it if you will give me the grace to poke around a little bit—each of us knowing that our ride will take us over some smooth pavement and some rutted out dirt roads and maybe even to places that don’t even have but a little impression in the ground of a few footprints that have gone before us.

Enjoy your ride.

Today is one of those creative thinking days following an afternoon off work in order to gather grapevines in the woods of Ashe County, North Carolina with my wife the basket maker. It is something we have done off and on for about 25 years and can be considered one of our “little adventures”.

And my wife is a women who is all about adventure—of which I can say realistically—we haven’t taken nearly enough of them in our lifetime together. Every couple of years, when we can afford it, we head off to New York City and do the gallery thing; the eating thing; the bookstore thing; the Canal Street and Chinatown thing and the walking around from morning til night thing—almost always ending our day in Times Square before heading back to the motel where we sleep for a while and then get up the next day to do it all over again.

It is Sandi and I exploring what the city has to offer and we have never been disappointed—we are always glad to leave and always glad to get back to our 3/4 acre plot of home and garden.

But yesterday, our adventure was in the woods where we pull the vines out of the trees so that Sandi can make the handles for the baskets she sells every Saturday at the local Farmer’s Market. And after all these years of making them, they are still selling well and bringing some much needed extra income into our family.

Did I mention that my wife is very unselfish with her time and her money—she likes pocket change and a good sale but much of what she has earned over all these years has gone into braces for the kids and shoes and all the little extras that crop up everyday when you have four kids in a one point two kid world.

We began our basket adventure together in 1983 when I quit my job as a writer for the Jefferson Times and we went into basket making full time. We’d do the craft shows that a potter friend of our had told us about and made enough money to pay the bills and get to the next show. By the time we ended our “full time” adventure 4 1/2 years later we were doing up to 22 shows a year from Boca Raton, Florida in February to Richmond, Virginia in November. We did k-mart parking lots and street fairs and even had several wholesale accounts—but the day came when it was time for me to get another job and move on from there. But Sandi has never quit making them and they have been good to us for many years.

I was thinking about all of this as I took a walk today during lunch hour. The fact that I have an amazing wife is not lost on me although I do sometimes take her from granted—but I am working on that aspect of our relationship. As my friend Ben Cox has said many times—we both married up-stream. And that is probably true for you as well.

I also thought about the fact that what makes baskets valuable from a pratical standpoint is that they can be used to hold and carry stuff. And this thought led me to Lao Tzu and one of my favorite sayings by him.

A fair warning: all translations are not the same and I am partial to the one done by Jane English. What follows is the one that I remember best.

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 11

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

My wife and I have a good marriage and I often tell young people that the reason for this is the fact that we take lots of walks together. This is so true—but I guess I will have to add another one as well—put some adventure in your lives and those regular times won’t seem nearly as long.

The truth is out there, no matter where you find it. Enjoy your ride and your adventure.

Father’s day was last Sunday but I just received a card from my second to youngest daughter. In the hustle and bustle to get to our house for breakfast on Sunday, she had forgotten to bring it and told me she would drop it off later.

It is a thoughtful card and inside she had penned a note about how grateful she is that I am her father and so on. I am glad that she feels this way but there is still something in me that says “I could have been better” which has the effect of almost negating the good things she has to say about me in her note.

It’s not that I don’t believe her or believe that she really feels this way about me—I just have a hard time feeling that I earned or deserve her compliments. Relationships with your children can be sticky and over the years the complications of parenthood sometimes overshadow the other stuff.

I could have been a better dad—even after all these years I am still selfish with my time and am in process—but I guess that is not really the point either.

When Sandi and I became parents we bagan a journey that would take us into the same unchartered waters that all those parents before and those that would come after entered into—we were basically writting our own “parenting manual” each and every day. We did some things right and some things wrong and were sometimes quick and sometimes slow to make the changes that were necessary to make things work better. We spent more time with the first than we did the second and by the time the third one popped out we were a bit in over our heads as it were.

Lydia was a people person and so she spent a lot of time in our neighborhood with her friends. Our lives had gotten busy and sometimes, in retrospect, I feel she may have fallen through a few cracks that we would have closed had we been paying more attention. But what is done is done—right!

We had family values for sure—dinner time at our house was scaroscant—which means that at 5:30, no matter where they were, it was time to gather around the table and have dinner. We attended church faithfully and for almost 15 plus years took a family vacation at the beach in South Carolina every September. It was our tradition and we all looked forward to that time.

Birthdays were special days and Thanksgiving and Christmas were always times to gather and give thanks for what we were as a family. We did baseball and track and school plays as well and in the process took a lot of pictures which chronicle those times. We encouraged our kids to be self-sufficient, trustworthy and good workers—to think for themselves and desire a relationship with God.

So—after all of this I have almost talked myself into believing that our lives were exceptional and full of everything that most people only dream of—and that to is the point. They were and are and have not yet been fully lived out—we are on this ride together and that’s a good thing in this day and age.

Therefore—in the midst of my middle age thing—I am grateful for the fact that my daughter loves me and feels that I have been a good dad—even though I can think of a lot of reasons why I wasn’t what I could have been.

In a very real sense, our lives begin today and go forward from this point on. Yesterday’s spilled milk can never be put back into the container but who would want to anyway.

I will be, and have been, a better husband, father and friend than I will ever be able to come to terms with. But at any moment this could change as well and I could accept myself for who I am and have been created to be and jump as high on the trampoline of life as I dare to go.

There’s a lot of summer left here in these mountains and there is still a family being born that I am a part of.

What’s not to like about that?

After Note: I wrote this early am and in the moment. I did get a great card and a coffee mug with an zebra on it from my youngest daughter on Sunday (she always does awesome cards) and two cards from my oldest daughter. The first one came back to her with postage due so she sent them both out with the right postage. They arrived today. I got a call from my son and one from my firstborn as well. I do feel loved up on in just the right way.

It’s been a busy two weeks and I really don’t know where the time went—maybe some aliens came and sucked it up in a big time machine and took it back to their planet to study it or something. Maybe they will release it as a movie and play it back in slow motion—all in the name of anthropology or inter-planetary relations.

Really, it’s been a full two weeks since I took a day off work and planted 16 rows of corn and 10 rows of beans the hard way. What I mean by the hard way is now the only way to plant corn around my house. I till  the ground a couple of times and rake out a lot of the weed stuff and then hammer stakes every two feet or so and then tie string between each stake and across the garden itself. Then I rake a final time—lime and fertilize only the ground underneath the string and then with a v-pointed hoe, create the little furrows that I will then drop seed into. Total running time of that endevour—four hours and then some. I hope the aliens get a kick out of seeing me tie all those strings.

The reason I put the string across the garden—other than the fact of getting straight rows—is that the crows will not eat my corn before it has a chance to get big enough to survive. Two years ago, I planted lots of corn and then waited for it to come up. Every couple of mornings I would walk out into the garden and look and find no little corn plants popping up. It was very dry and I just thought I needed to water the garden to get the seeds to germinate. When the beans started to show I began to worry a little but it wasn’t until I walked out into the garden early one morning and saw a crow family having breakfast on my little plants that I knew what had happened.

So, after all that work that year, I didn’t get any corn and asked around as to what I might do to avoid being the crows restaurant. A friend of mine—a local builder and long time gardener—told me that the only way was to put strings across your rows because the crows would not go under anything the get something to eat. And so far it seems to have worked—last year we had lots of corn and I am hoping the same for this year.

I like corn a lot but I really plant it for my wife who can make a meal out of the stuff. Eating five or six ears at a meal is not unheard of—it is especially nice when you can have tomatoes at the same meal—all from the garden.

Last year we had a couple of corn parties where I picked a wheelbarrow full and we invited people to shuck it and then boiled it for a minute or two and then went to town with the pepper and butter. Most people looked sheepish after an ear or two but would keep eating with just a little prodding from us—it’s not like they had ever been to an all-you-can-eat fresh garden corn restaurant before.

Gardens are fun but a lot of work. Two evenings ago Sandi was out of town visiting a friend and I thought I would do a little weeding before dinner. When the weeds are taller than the plants they surround, you know you’ve got a problem. Somewhere in this one patch was the carrots I had planted several weeks ago and I was determined to give them a really good chance at maturing into something we could eat in a couple of months. It had rained the day before and the ground was a little softer but I still almost sprained my wrists pulling all the weeds out of that little patch of garden. I ddin’t get them all as the weeds really close to the carrots are going to take a little extra finesse to get them out without destroying the carrots they surround but I think I am up to the task.

My tomatoes are doing alright but are still hidden and so today I might have to go out and do a little cleaning up around them. Tomatoes don’t like neighbors and mine have a subdivision around them so I will have to take some action along those lines in order to get a harvest out of them vines.

I don’t know what it is about growing a garden that is so hard to keep up, but every year I am faced with some of the same weeding tasks brought about mostly by my delays. Life gets busy and before you know it—weeding time has come and gone and you wake up on the other side of it not having taken the time t do it and therefore the processs is just a little worse than it would have been had you tackled the weeds a few days earlier. Sometimes it is dry and the weeds are under control and it really isn’t good to pull them out of dry ground as you will do more damage to the plants around them. Then it rains for a couple of days and you aren’t out weeding during that time and then the next time you look those darn weeds are everywhere. It is a lot like life I guess. You don’t want to live your life out of an appointment book but the floating down the stream in a canoe method has its’ downside.

Like I said before, it’s been a busy couple of weeks and it will take a little while to catch back up. I just finished reading a great book entitled “Blue Like Jazz” by Donald Miller. In it he talks a lot about his journey from being a person with religion to one with an authentic spirituality. It is quite an unusual book in its “realness” and I would highly recomend it to any who want to let their thinking about life and God be stirred up a bit.

As I write I am begining to think that I was reading when I should have been weeding. But sometimes, a man just needs a little time with a good book in order to take the next few steps into his life—at least with me that’s how it has always been. I need a little fuel for the fire and if it comes my way via a good book—I will take that as well even though that is all you think about until you finish it.

I have also been reading a little Anne Carson poetry in between and another book called “Velvet Elvis” which I have just begun.

The forecast in my world for today is for full sun, a breakfast with some family and maybe a bike ride for later before heading out to afternoon church. My advice is that if you find a good book, take time to read it but don’t forget the weeds—they are always going to be there but are harder to get rid of when they get real big.

Enjoy your ride and let someone know you appreciate them today.

PS: For those of you who read this before I cleaned up the typos—sorry!