And on Sunday, Heather reminded us all that He makes beautiful things out of dust.

Among the gods there is none like You, O Lord;
Nor are there any works like Your works.
All nations whom You have made
Shall come and worship before You, O Lord,
And shall glorify Your name.
For You are great, and do wondrous things;
You alone are God.  Psalm 86:8-10

As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience. Luke 8:15

One other thing stirs me when I look back at my youthful days, viz the fact that so many people gave me something or were something to me without knowing it. Much that I should otherwise not have felt so clearly or done so effectively was felt or one as it was, because I stand, as it were, under the sway of these people. Hence I always think that we all live, spiritually, but what others have given us in the significant hours of our life. These significant hours do not announce themselves as coming, but arrive unexpectedly. Nor do they make a great show of themselves; they pass almost unperceived. Often, indeed, their significance comes home to us first as we look back, just as the beauty of a piece of music or of a landscape often strikes us first in our recollection of it. –Albert Schweitzer

Today we pray for the courage to dig ourselves deep, to hold fast, so that Your word my take root in us and bring forth fruit.

The ends of many seasons are piled pell-mell higher and higher, overflowing cardboard box after heaped up cardboard box. And stacks of furs and leathers and paints and feathers are neatly arranged on three of those Calvary Missionary Press tables up against the wall as Nicole digs deep into crafting twenty-five, more or less, viking-native-apocalyptic-greekgods sorts of costumes.  And last night, Heather and Dustin received word that the sale of their house went through which is a good thing because they are flying out of LA for Barcelona on June 4 but there are a few boxes between then and now and a lot of saying gut-wrenching goodbyes. And the letter in the morning from a lawyer underscoring my need to move some other boxes and the word NOW was typed in all caps. And sixteen of us gathered in Momma’s new place for its first family dinner amid even more cardboard boxes and stacks of unhung pictures although she and Jenny and Alene and Scott have done a masterful job of creating home and beauty in pretty short order.

My little plastic IN boxes are crammed stuffed with not only multi-genre research papers and final drafts of business formatted letters to a politician of their choice and design proposals for constructing a theoretical guest house on a secluded hill hidden in Saguaro National Forest east and journals detailing twenty-one days of reducing energy consumption, but there are textbooks to count, laptops to scrape clean, and btw I just found out that I am responsible for putting together the entire middle school section of the yearbook before I leave for graduation.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Another thing on my plate is creating an “award” for each of my students to be read aloud at graduation in a week. So my thoughts ramble about, mulling over specific and detailed affirmation points in the midst of Please sit down in your chair and Please spit out your gum into the trashcan and Please remember to retake your genetics quiz. Oh yeah, and I have a goodbye speech for graduation to at least think about. Gotta do that too.

And today after the flag-raising ceremony and shouting Happy Birthday to this week’s celebrants, I am packing eighth grade onto a city bus and heading off for a (long) day of bumper boats and laser-tag. Except for that rather long list of kiddos who are going to spend today in the library with the rather long lists I generated of missing work.

And especially now I am so very aware of Schweitzer’s observed truth. You just never know. Yesterday there was a little orange note in my staff mailbox to Dear Mrs. Voelkel you will never know the impact you have had on my life slid between the permission note forms and a reminder that the server is going to be down for a few hours.

And yesterday afternoon there was a request that pulled me away from my google.classroom docs. I needed to make a phone call in Spanish to a high schooler’s mother about an essay she wrote in class that day, an essay about wanting to sneak into her dad’s closet and use his handgun to splatter all of her problems to bits. And the older sister was an addict that got thrown out of the house and lived on the streets until she got tossed into jail. And this youngest of four sisters, this babecita, is all that the parents have left. And in all their thirty-four years of marriage they never fought in front of the kids but always went into another room. It was a long phone call.

This morning I woke up way early. Way too early. I thought about Jesus waking up to pray while it was still dark.  I wondered if His prayers went upward, sparks rising up towards the starry sky marveling in worship or outward, casting a thoughtful eye into the oh-so-many-conversations of the day, for He cares for us. Or inward. Settling into Presence.

Holy Spirit, You are welcome here

Come flood this place and fill the atmosphere

Your glory, God, is what our hearts long for

To be overcome by Your presence LORD

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

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.