Caliche All Around

The seed that fell on good soil are those who hear the word and commit themselves to it with a good and upright heart. Through their resolve, they bear fruit.  Luke 8:15 

Last Sunday I stretched out in the hammock on Heather and Dustin’s back porch.  I was mostly interested in being comfortable and squished a pillow behind my neck as I caught the last few rays of warming sun because I am always cold.   Heather and Dustin were not cold.  They were picking and shoveling through hard layers of gravel, ancient trash, old cement, and a sort of yellow clay.   I was pretty impressed with my daughter as she hefted that pick up high without a wobble and slammed it against the caliche-wracked ground.  Dustin was amazing.  His pick sliced deep through that, pause, notice how I hesitate to say that sword?  Really quite difficult to imagine a good harvest from that.

So technically, the focus seems to be the good and upright heart where the seed happens to fall. But that sort of soul just doesn’t happen.  We all begin like caliche or that volcanic rhyolite which is nice to look at but forms the foundations of their old tough house for a good reason.  

Things were pretty rough with old Frederic the German when he first arrived.  We were not at all what he expected from the movies.  The only movie that resembles day-to-day life at the Voelkel home is Jimmy Stewart’s breakout film, You Can’t Take It with You, complete with twirling ballerinas and explosions from somewhere under the house.   I fielded daily phone calls from San Francisco, Washington DC and somewhere in Europe which made me a little crabby.  No, we were not beating Frederic, and yes, I was looking for another host family for him.  If there was a button to push, I would have voted him off of my island, that’s for sure.  I think that the turning point came Christmas morning.  There had been other moments, for sure, when the pick cracked through the crust: the zombie parade after James and Leona’s wedding, Nicole decorating him for the All Hallow’s Eve fest and dragging him around and around Reid Park at a slow jog and piling the boys into her funny car and heading down the freeway to Victory Worship Chapel for Wednesday youth nights and maybe, just maybe, me teaching him how to wash dishes properly.  

I was a little worried.  Twenty-seven people for Christmas morning, and just one tiny Italian expresso pot.  Igor was tending the fire.  Alan was busying himself in the back room with some last minute details.  So I informed old Fred that he was in charge of the capuchino.  I ran him through the steps of grinding, lighting the stove (its own separate step in complexity), frothing, zapping, and then the last little sprinkle of bitter chocolate.  And beyond of course all the obvious, duh, aspects of ownership, and place, and service and creating something beautiful, and hearing “Thank you, thank you” about a hundred times that day, God did His work.  

But an important thing is that I didn’t skooch over when the sun sunk out of sight and a dark shadow fell across my face.  It’s not about be comfortable.  And that Heather and Dustin are digging yet another bed in their rather recalcitrant backyard.  It’s not about being easy.  And I was talking to Marco a few nights ago and he said he had one of the I-should-of-had-a-V8 moments, which of course is not what he called it, but a whack in the forehead kind of moment.  Remembering when he rather arrogantly schooled the Famous Street Evangelist who was sort of making Christianity seem like an intellectual plaything, and Marco saw it differently.  And then what?  What happens after the guy goes, “Oh, yeah, you are right.  You win the argument.”  What happens after that?  I will tell you what happens.  You got to pick up your cross.  Every single day.  And follow Him.

So now it’s at the picking up the cross time of life.  Not so easy.  Every day.  And sometimes that cross looks like a pick and shovel preparing soil for the seed.  And maybe the harvest has something to do with the resolve of the farmer as well.  Because you just never know when the sower might pass your way.