Treasures of the Meadow and Forest

During our day and a half in the mountains, Danny was excited to find a blue columbine--Colorado's state flower.

 

One man's trash--another man's (or little boy's) treasure!

Timmy, Danny and Hannah love to find old bullets along the road. They found hundreds here, and collected them to turn in at the scrap metal--but first to play with like hidden treasure!

 I preferred to lift my eyes to the sunshine meadow--warm with flowers hiding in the grass.

 Jonathan and I explored hand in hand--

or should I say, camera in hand!

 Jonathan even kept finding flowers for me to photograph, or snapped shots himself. 

These were shooting stars.

 And of course asters growing where nothing ought to grow--

just like God brings beauty from ashes,

and rays of sun-colored centers reflecting the sun overhead.

 And lunch consisted of potato chips--sliced and fried in turns by each child except the littlest and "biggest."

Mom did those.

 A marmot that chattered and screamed and ran at our vehicle and then fled back to his rock and scuttled under backwards, then out again, chattering at us like he was sure we were going to toss him some crumbs.

 And then we found this sign. 

I should say, Jonathan found it. 

He noticed the scribbles almost too small and light to see--and looked at me!

 "FALLING [in love] ROCK[s]"!

So we had Sam take this snap--

and a picture is worth a thousand words!

What each other's arms mean to us, reminds us that always 

"underneath are the everlasting arms."

 And how the warning of "FALLING ROCK"--the message of judgment and law and doom--

is transformed into the message: "For God so loved...:"

"For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world,

but that the world through Him might be saved."

Hearts transformed by His love need fear no falling rock of judgment.

"For those who fall on that stone shall be broken,

but on whomever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder."

So let us fall, O Christ, upon You the Rock, and be broken.

Only let not Your judgment fall upon us and grind us to powder!

Another treasure along the forest trail--a bit of sky upon the ground.

 And more Colorado flowers, almost as tall as Danny and Hannah.

 And then the wild strawberries--so worth the search!

 Tiny forest sweetness--hunkering low.

Nothing so sweet in the tops of the forest trees--

 only low to the ground.

"He that is down need fear no fall; 

He that is low no pride."

wrote John Bunyan in a poem we decided today to memorize.

Commercial strawberries can never match the tender forest sweetness of these tiny berries of July mountains.

And so we search and find the tiny tidbits and nibble like bees attracted to nectar.

 Like insects covering these white blossoms not because they are grand,

or pompous, 

or all that colorful or great.

But because they are sweet.

 And then there are these blue-purple blossoms, reflecting the reflection of the sky--

sky-blue treasures of the woodland dell.

While the Dew Is Still on the Roses

But before we talk about roses....

Last weekend the girls and I made lots of food for the next couple days: bacon-wrapped jalapenos (which we were going to take to feed some that were helping our new pastor move in) deviled eggs, potato salad, etc.  The girls have stepped up so much since Crystal went to Africa.

 

 The little boys think pond water on frogs is preferable to dew on roses. They collected no less than 41 little frogs after the last rain, in this bucket. And yes, they did soon later free them back to the pond!

 We didn't let Crystal's absence keep us from having fun! We decided to camp in the mountains for a couple days.

While Jonathan and the children happily collected old twigs and dry pine needles for the campfire....

 I explored nearby.

 And the heart of an eastern girl drank in the budding wild roses.

 And the fully blossomed ones, too.

 Morning of camp found Carrie making a luscious breakfast of bacon, eggs, and skillet toast...

 which we ate out by the fire.
Here Jonathan is bringing a huge old bunch of dead branch to stir the fire to life. 

And isn't it amazing how God can take the dry and the dead and the old and turn it into a blazing fire

for His glory? Until the smoke is all away, and you must back off from all the heat, 

and honor the blaze that burns the chaff

and the fire that glows in the morning coolness.

 And then as you go on exploring, there is no end of trees:

trees that stand upright,

and trees that have sprawled, all over the forest floor,

cluttering,

dead, 

tripping up those who are looking for God's glory. 

 And we--

we have to choose.

Do we allow logs--those logs in our brother's eye 

and the ones in our own--

do we let them trip us?

Or do we use them as bridges--to cross over the rushing streams,

 to get us places we never reached before?

Everyone crossed this log. Even Mom. 

We all made it. 

We got over that beam in our eye, and that log in our brother's eye. 

 We faced the uprooted tree--

where the shallow life resulted in the wind blowing, and the storm lashing, 

and the tree falling-

 and we had a choice: to live an uprooted life, or to become more firmly rooted,

where "he shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, whose leaf also shall not wither, 

and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper."

 God of our rivers,

God of our storms,

God of our lives, root us and ground us in You!

 And an eastern girl's heart aches just a bit as she takes a picture of a dewy patch of wild strawberries.

 And an almost blossoming rosebud.

 And we walk along the path of life,

where sometimes a little child shall lead them.

 Sometimes the way is soft, like moss to our feet.

 And sometimes we pause in the shadow of those uprooted trees...

 remembering that God transforms the broken places of our lives,

the stumps, the leftovers,

slowly but surely into wonderful, workable humus--the stuff that the forest floor is made of,

the stuff that the ants and bacteria consume and transform into soil that grows things beautiful...

 like more wild roses,

with heart shaped petals

like the one Danny discovered and brought with shining eyes to his dad and mom.

And are we willing to be made into humus, to be disintegrated, 

to disappear into nothingness

so He can be everything?

Are we willing to leave our heart in His hand,

to mold and fashion, to purify and beautify--

until it is His dew that is seen on the roses?

Lettuce Plant a Flower!

Danny and Hannah picking some tender large lettuce leaves from Carrie's raised bed.

The flower bed we filled with flowers Saturday. It was one of the happiest days we've had in months.

Every last one of us were outside in the cool of the morning, working on and around the front porch. While Sam and boys worked on bicycles, some of us were trying to decide how we wanted to arrange the flowers we'd bought.

I told Jonathan my idea about hanging flowerpots up in the corner to keep them protected from wind, rain, goats, chickens and beating hot sun. And this is what he came up with.

I just loved the tiered effect. Time and again, we've gone out and sat for a few brief moments in that wonderful Amish Hearts porch swing that I bought a couple years ago for our anniversary--and just tried to take time to breathe.

And we arranged the petunias and daisies by the door.

This is what it looked like behind the scenes! It was such a blessing to have Jonathan home to help.

I also had to pat myself on the back for allowing myself to spend money on a bunch of flowers. I felt like I needed them.

Fixing bikes to have a bike ride together later.

The girls have a cucumber plant growing indoors.

...because it just doesn't work well to plant outdoors. Somehow Friday, the children who picked lettuce for our sandwiches left the screen off Carrie's beautiful raised bed, and when we came home, this is what we found--everything stripped bare and all eaten up by the young chickens that had squeezed through the yard fence. Needless to say, Carrie was in tears.

And when we've been stripped bare of everything worthy and lovely, and all that is left is a stem and a root, 

we go and we plant flowers.

Because a person's character shows up when they've been beaten and scorned and crucified and shredded, and all that is left is a stick--and a root.

Christ was, said the prophet Isaiah, not at all beautiful or worthy to look at or esteem. He was like a "root out of dry ground." [How pretty is that?] 

Yet, He bore our sins and carried our sorrows, though He was ill esteemed and afflicted.

I read in one of the gospels Sunday, how Christ cast out a demon, and despite the wonderful thing He had done, the religious folk decided that He had done it through the power of the devil. 

So then Jesus had to defend Himself, and say, "How can Satan cast out Satan? A house divided against itself falls."

If Christ, the sinless, faultless Lamb of God, was so brutally criticized, falsely accused and treated like He was the devil, then how can we expect to fare any better? We can just expect that when we are trying to serve Him and do His will, there will always be those who are sure we are doing it out of a devilish motive. Convinced of that, they will start picking at our faults, of which there are many, for we are very undivine, and not all-knowing and all-wise as our Lord was, and our heads are not always caught up with our hearts.

But when our vegetable garden has been despoiled by the enemy, we choose to plant flowers--and have a wonderfully happy time doing it!