Beets, Borsch, and Being Ready

My mother likes to tell the story about St. Francis who was busy working in his garden when a pilgrim passing by asked, "What would you do if you knew that Jesus were to come back today?"

 

The old friar smiled and simply said, "I would go on working in my garden!"

 That story tells us two things.

1) St. Francis was ready, living in obedience. 

2) St. Francis knew that working in one's garden, however lowly and practical work it was, was just as spiritual as praying or preaching, because it was just part of a disciplined and obedient lifestyle.  

Timmy sent us pictures of being out with his cousins digging potatoes a few weeks ago. 

 

It's been a very warm October and November. Gardens kept growing way late. But we had to harvest before the frost. I picked lots of beets.Here they are!

I saved a few greens to steam and eat with butter and salt, and cooked, peeled and canned the rest.

Well, I used a few for borsch, too, our favorite soup!

We even got a few zucchini before the frost!

And Jonathan picks a couple red serrano peppers anytime he wants some zip added to his meals!

Also a small sweet pepper from our greenhouse.

And a few pumpkins which we use for decoration until Thanksgiving, and then turn into pies!

Whether gardening, cooking, digging potatoes, praying, sewing, ironing, or doing dishes,

we can live ready, like the wise friar, and simply go on doing our duty with a pure heart full of love for God and our fellow man.  

The World's Largest Cuckoo Clock--When Will It Chime for Me?

 Another acquaintance of Jonathan's just went to her eternal reward this evening--Ruth Saine, a lady who played baritone horn along with Jonathan in the band of People's Bible College long years ago. She was aunt to Tillman Nelson's wife, and never married, Jonathan says. As one by one our old friends, acquaintances and even family members are called away, it leaves us wondering who will be next and when it will be our turn.

On our way to the Columbus, Ohio, airport in October, after the news of Jonathan's mother being in the hospital reached us, we had an hour or so to spend in Sugar Creek, where we had seen that the World's largest cuckoo clock was.

It was an Ohio historical marker. The Alpine Alpa restaurant in Wilmot, OH, commissioned clockmaker Karl Schleutermann to build it in 1963. It took 12 years and $30,000.

It was featured on the cover of the Guiness Book of World Records in 1978. The clock was moved to Sugar Creek later and restored.

Jonathan hunted in a bakery nearby for a piece of elderberry pie that I was longing for, (and found one!) while I chose a package of sympathy cards at a Mennonite book shop across the street from this clock. Little did we know that one and a half weeks later, sympathy cards would begin coming our way.

We got pictures of an Amish school with a bunch of bicycles parked out by the road...and didn't know that two weeks later we'd be helping with Mama Lucas's obituary and finding out that she never learned to ride a bicycle. She rode a pony instead!

We passed an Amish home with clothesline full, and didn't know that Mama would never hang clothes in her back yard on her Amish-style clothes line again.

We spent a brief 15 or so minutes in a little museum where there was this ancient voting booth in a corner of a display--and didn't know that Mama had voted for the last time!

 

We looked at this unicycle and some sort of megaphone--and didn't know that the trumpet was about to blow for Mama.

For Jonathan's mom, there would be no more voting, no more hanging clothes on the line, and no more talk about school days.  

The World's Largest Cuckoo Clock had chimed for her.

Heaven had called her name. 

And she had slipped away.

Jesus, I do not know when my name will be called. I've spent most of my life with a sort of gnawing worry about that time in the back of my mind.

Would I be ready?

Would I miss being ready somehow?

This week, I decided something. I decided to stop asking God if I am ready.

Instead, since I have given Him my heart and never taken it back, I will simply trust Him that I am ready--and assume that He will let me know if there is anything I need to take care of.

Simply trust Him that His blood covers all my sins and that He will take my hand when the World's Largest Cuckoo clock chimes for me.

Umbrella Over Grandma

 I just ran across these two pictures taken hastily this summer when Mama Lucas was here for supper one day. It was raining for a bit that evening--just when Mama and Daddy Lucas wanted to leave to go home.

Sam put up an umbrella while I was helping Mama down the front porch steps, and she took his arm. (You can see just a little of her in front of the blur of me!)

Then I managed to get this snap just before they disappeared behind the fir tree in our front yard. 

Because I didn't know what the future held. And to me, there is nothing as kind or great as a young man sheltering his grandmother under his umbrella.

 It was not a heroic deed, just an ordinary courtesy, but one that left Sam's mother wanting to keep that picture etched in her memory. 

And here it is-- two weeks to the day after Sam's grandmother's funeral. 

Just a little picture of the sheltering Heavenly Umbrella that Mama Lucas came under when she left this world for Home and took the arm of God. 

My Newest Book Off the Press!

Yesterday when the UPS man arrived, I was excited to find three boxes on my porch--full of my newest book, the second in the Kiev series--Sunshine and Shadows in Kiev.

 I was so excited to open the box and see if the color of the cover was improved over the proof I had gotten a couple weeks ago.

 Here, below is a comparison between the two, though my camera did not do justice to the colors.

Still, you can see that the colors on the left are brighter than the ones on the right. 

Ezra, who does the formatting, and I had a time trying to come up with the right colors for the cover. 

 

Here are some of the colors we tried.

And here is what we ended up with, below.

Hannah tells me I should have my friend Kathleen Stevenson paint a picture for the next printing. She thinks the painting on the front of my next book (Christmas in the Carpathian Mountains) which is at the printer right now is the kind of painting that I need on this book, too. 

I think I agree, but I did not have a painting to use!

And while I was waiting for the second book to arrive to begin distributing, I was getting the third book ready to go. It's a smaller book, just six chapters, a Christmas story which I wanted to have ready to distribute by the end of this month. 

And it has paintings for illustrations--done by an old friend, Kathleen Stevenson, whose little kids Jonathan used to caper around with in New Jersey while building a house for his brother Dave.

He used to play with Kathleen's little children and pine over when would he ever get a wife and have kids of his own to play with. 

Now he has a wife, kids, and boxes of books coming out his ears,

with pictures painted by that mother of those long-ago and faraway kids! 

I needed a new mug shot of myself for the back of that book, so that is me up there trying to figure out how to wear the scarf to give myself a bit of a Christmas look. 

I can write books, but I can't make a scarf look right!

A lady at church one Sunday recently told me that you can do no wrong with a scarf. 

I hope that's true!

 

Well, it's not very great, but hey, it's me! 

Bricks to Throw or Firewood to Glow?

Today Jonathan read that po lice in Ke no sha, WI, are finding pallets of bricks that are mysteriously appearing in the streets.

It doesn't even take very much brain in one's head to figure out what is about to happen there

if some American citizens don't quietly get busy and see that the bricks are suddenly found to have disappeared just as mysteriously as they appeared.  

(Where are the brave men and women of our day who could come up with some leadership ability to creatively thwart evil by simply causing some bricks to disappear before the wrong people come along to throw them at windows if the jury decides something about Ky le Rit ten house that they don't like?)

 

Well, I am not in Keno sha, and neither are my children. 

My teenage boy has been busy splitting and stacking firewood (not bricks) to sell.

 In the absence of his bigger brother ( who is, incidentally, the same age as nationally known Kyle Rit ten house) Danny's big sister Rose has run the chain saw to cut the logs and then Danny splits and stacks the wood.

They sold a cord of wood this evening. 

They also found out about four rabbit hutches someone was about to throw in the trash. 

They went yesterday and got them, and today sold them.

g

I watched Rose taking care of chickens and rabbits and selling a couple hens that aren't laying well, 

while I gathered eggs and checked school work and ironed and addressed envelopes and wrote a thank you letter.  

I watched her riding her horse and then leaving with a sister this evening to do chores morning and evening for an elderly couple who is gone to England until Sunday.My family is too busy to join the rioters stacking bricks on streets. But if we hear it is happening in a town near us, we might just lay aside our firewood splitters and horses and axes and rabbit hutches and ironing boards and other things and find how we might help piles of bricks to disappear mysteriously before anyone has a chance to throw them.

Elk Hunting Ruined by Noise

Two weeks ago or so, the children traveled down to their hunting spot in the San Juan Mountains right down near the border of New Mexico, to hunt elk.

Three friends went along and so did Jonathan, who got his elk just three minutes after hunting season opened! 

 

At 6:57 it became legal to shoot, and at 7:00, he was pulling the trigger!

Once again God supplied us with a good cow elk that gave us over 200 pounds of meat. 

But despite staying up there and hunting for days, the children and their friends didn't get a thing.

Other campers who appeared to be ignorant of effective hunting methods, were driving up the mountain road in the middle of the night, camping right in the middle of the elk meadow, and circling around the meadow during the day, talking, coughing, sneezing, and in general making so much noise and commotion that what elk would dare to come out that day?

It was impossible for the children to effectively hunt because of all the careless people, noise, and ignorance.

Granted, they had a blast anyway, hiking, hunting, and cooking on the wood stove in the big hunting tent. But an elk they could not get.

The only elk we got was Jonathan's early in the morning on the very first day of that particular elk season. Before all the distractions began. 

And I wonder, Lord, how many times we miss out on getting something from You because we are just too distracted, too noisy, too ignorant of effective communication with You?

How often do we live our busy lives putting anything and everything ahead of You? Not that mothers should always get up an hour before the family to pray(I've actually read that, as if mothers are supposed to be even more superhuman than fathers), but are there times and ways that we forget to quiet our hearts? To wait quietly before the Lord?

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Lord, I admit I too often am distracted. 

Sometimes I am even so busy praying over a prayer list that I don't really communicate with You as a friend. 

Help us today to make time to quiet our hearts and wait upon You,

for You, Lord, are our help and our Shield.