Overturned Trucks and Lilypad Lakes

Just as Jonathan and I were dozing off to sleep Sunday night, I heard footsteps in the house and then an engine starting in the driveway. Startled wide awake, I realized Sam must be heading off to an emergency call.

And my volunteer fireman son wasn't just heading off--he was roaring off at top speed!
The next thing we heard was the assistant chief's vehicle roaring down the road, too, also at top speed.

Well, sleep was fleeing by then, and soon I was up wondering and wandering, praying for the emergency and for my son and doing other quiet things. 

Sam had rushed off the night before as well to help when somebody had a fall.

This time, I would learn the next morning, it was a roll-over, and the driver had left the rolled-over truck blocking Rt. 24 and had disappeared. 

Being the mom of a volunteer fireman makes life interesting, especially when I am also the mom of six other children who keep life hopping.

But then there is Danny. 

The quiet one.

The one who enjoys fishing.

I was eager to get on home three weeks ago after camping for the weekend.

But Danny wanted to do some more fishing and so, while several of the other children headed toward home in Sam's truck, Jonathan parked our van and trailer a while by a lake.

We called it Lilypad Lake. 

It was covered with blooming lilypads.

 Danny caught a big fish in a short time, and then he caught another one. 

So Jonathan decided to stay longer, until he could catch at least one more.

I brought my journal down and sat on a rock to write in it--and saw a scuttling tick on that same rock,

the first tick I think I ever saw just walking on a rock instead of on a person.

Usually, I don't see ticks until they are on or in someone!

Well, I brushed the tick away, and sat writing and watching and otherwise just being quiet for a while,

out in the woods by the lilypad lake.

"He leadeth me beside the still waters."

There was something about being quiet, just drinking in the beauty and the stillness and letting the quietness rest our constantly frazzled spirits,

watching our son flick his line here and there and then stand over-the-knee deep in the quiet lake,

waiting for a bite. 

We didn't know what life would hold for us in just the next few weeks--

everything from rattlesnakes to a man attempting suicide by jumping off a bridge.

But for nearly three hours, we just walked, and sat, and watched our quiet son

fishing in Lilypad Lake.

My Sustain Pedal Problem--and He Shall Sustain You

Over the last few weeks or months, the sustain pedal on our piano had quit working properly.

For those of you who don't play piano, the sustain pedal is the pedal on the right, which, if you press it down with your foot, will cause the sounds of the notes to sustain by releasing the damper pads from touching the strings inside the piano. 

Without this pedal, the notes would all sound choppy and clonky, if you know what I mean, instead of holding their tones for a while and flowing into each other. 

Well, I am not the kind of person to just call an expensive technician to fix something that I can fix myself, so I pulled the big board out from under the piano keys and looked at the pedal and the gismos attached to it. I looked up "sustain pedal on piano won't work" online, and found out that sometimes it just needs an easy fix--tightening the nut on the bolt that connects the pedal to the bars that go to the strings. 

Well, I tried to tighten the nut, and then I tried to loosen it, and then tighten it again, but nothing worked. I was at a loss. Maybe it was a bigger problem with the pads on the strings needing to be adjusted, I wondered.

So, like it or not, I called the piano tuner to come repair my sustain pedal and tune the piano while he was at it. 

He came out and we took that front board off and he sat cross-legged on the floor and started twiddling with the nut. Then he got a pair of pliers out of his toolbox and told me that when you turn that nut, you have to make sure that you hold the bottom part of the bolt with pliers so that the whole thing doesn't turn while you are just trying to tighten the nut. 

I watched him in disbelief as, in a matter of a couple minutes, he fixed the problem by simply knowing what tool to use and how to use it. 

My eyeballs were seeing big numbers in the sky--one hundred and twenty dollars to tighten a nut on the piano and tune it. 

I could not describe my chagrin. My ignorance. My husband's hard-earned money. The piano tuner's skill. It was all rolling together into a ball of "oh no!" in my stomach. 

But I didn't know how to fix that problem. I have no mechanical prowess at all and hated to ask my husband about it who works late into the evening every night to keep his business running. 

So I had to call somebody who had skills with pianos and sustain pedals.

And I just knew God had a lesson for us. 

Sometimes our sustain pedal goes out in our lives. 

We aren't able to sustain the troubles and burdens and perplexities we are faced with. 

Clonk! goes our activity, and "Bonk!' sounds that note in our conversation. "Twonk! Twonk!" gasps one note after another in our relationships. Things are choppy, broken, and not flowing together well at all.  

The sustain pedal's nut has come loose--and in our ignorance and humanity, we don't know how to fix things .

That is when it is nice to have Someone to call, and a way to reach Him through prayer, 

like I knew about Roger's Piano Service and had his number on my bulletin board.

Many of our problems are really simple to fix. 

God knows exactly how to do it and what we ought to do. 

He knows that it is useless to just keep trying to turn that nut around and around, first this way and then that way, without first clamping pliers on the bolt underneath.

But we don't know that. 

That is why in our ignorance, we have to call on Him and ask for His help. 

Sometimes He will show us what we can do--apologize, ask forgiveness, extend forgiveness, know that you have forgiven even if they are still offended, take responsibility, accept the consequences of our decisions, graciously step down, humbly step up, offer to help, put the other person's desires before ours, pray for someone, learn to say "no," choose our "yes's" more carefully, keep our mouths shut next time, look at things from a different perspective. 

Other times, the best fix is to stop twisting and turning a problem around in our minds, and instead grab it with God's pliers and make the thoughts be still in our minds. Go stack wood and weed the garden and make a pie instead of mollygrubbing and trying to figure out why this person said this or why that person did that or what if they were offended by what I did?

Another fix is to stop trying to fix it ourselves and let Him do it. 

But any way you look at it, He knows best how to fix our problems, and how to get the sustain pedal working again!

"Cast your burden on the Lord, and He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved." Psalm 55:22

May He Himself sustain you, tighten the nut on your sustain pedal, and carry your burdens for you.

One Jumped from a Bridge--One Shared Gooseberry Pies

Today held contrasts--a tragedy and a time of peace.

A man who jumped from a bridge--and a man who tuned our piano and shared delightful stories.  

I got to experience the peace of the piano tuner while Jonathan was waiting out a tragedy played out right under the eyes of the excavator driver who was on his way to work for Jonathan. Jonathan texted me, having found out that the guy was delayed near I-25 south of town because a man was up on the bridge over the interstate, threatening to jump off. The excavator guy had come up behind the man's vehicle and couldn't pass around it to cross the bridge spanning the interstate, so he went to the man to ask him to move his vehicle, only to be told, "No! I'm going to jump off the bridge!" Other people started gathering and calling 911 while the man danced about on the bridge, watching traffic below for a chance to drop in front of someone. He would almost jump and then lose his nerve and back off. Sheriffs began to arrive as well, about six of them, Jonathan said, trying to persuade the man to get away from the guard rail. Instead, he ended up jumping anyway. Jonathan's excavator driver heard him hit the pavement. Thankfully the sheriff's had stopped traffic, but our guy did not want to look. It must have been anguish to not have been able to save him. A sheriff said later that the man who had jumped was still alive but not moving much as can only be imagined.

 Before reading on, would you join your heart in prayer for this hopeless man and for those who watched this tragedy unfold?

   Jesus, I bring to you the Man Who Jumped from the Bridge. You know his name and You care for him as much as You care for any of us. Please reach out to him, give him a fresh lease on life, may a chaplain in the hospital or someone come and reach out to him with Your love and hope. And also please remember Jonathan's excavator guy. I don't know his name either,  but he could not bear to look after the man jumped, and I can only imagine the anguish of not being able to save him. There were also all those parked on the interstate watching it unfold.  These horrifying incidents shake us, but we pray  it would turn someone's heart to You! We know this is the fault of Satan and sin, and You are not to blame. You are always reaching out with love and forgiveness to anyone who will turn to You. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Meanwhile at home, Roger was tuning our piano. He is a Christian who loves to come out to tune our piano in the country. He was telling me about his grandfather from Sweden who built a house on Long Island, and about his seven children, twenty-two grandchildren, and a several great grandchildren!

When he was done tuning the piano, he sat for a long time just talking from his heart about memories and about Christian, family-run businesses around town and south of town.

One of those businesses is Gooseberry Patch, a restaurant he and his wife enjoy. It sells gooseberry pies, and they would purchase pies to share with neighbors and friends during the shutdown.

Sorry this one pictured is not a gooseberry pie, just a rhubarb pie that theRose made recently, but it works.

Roger, the piano tuner, said he sensed the peace and love in our home out here. 

"Sometimes," he said, "there are things in the family and relatives that aren't good."

And sometimes, he pondered, good people die and the evil people are still living.

He said he struggled over Saddam Hussein and over Obsama bin Laden when our nation was trying to get them. Why did God let them live and then a good man have to die who was creating family-friendly movies that his home-schooled kids could watch?

Then one day as he was complaining to God about it, he heard, with his heart, God's voice, like a good Jew, he laughed, answering his questions with a question. "If I took Saddam Hussein," God said, "where would he be?"

Roger knew where Saddam would be. And later he pondered the significance of the verse in Lamentations about how the Lord's mercies are new every morning.

"Every morning God was talking to Saddam Hussein," he said. "And every day when Saddam would reject Him, He would come back the next morning."

How interesting! I thought. I wonder how many people, like Roger, God was teaching to pray for our enemies instead of hating them? 

It was a comfort to me to sit and listen to this man share his heart while sitting on the piano bench, about how God has taught him to love, however imperfectly, and to pray for our enemies. 

It was a comfort to sit there and listen to him talking about his Swedish grandfather, about a man who shared the gospel in cowboy language, and about gooseberry pies! 

All this while a man hovered between life and death on the interstate highway under a bridge down south. 

What a difference the gospel makes!

Camping in the Boonies--Preparation for the Mission Field

When the Lucas family goes camping, it is very good preparation for the Mission Field. 

Not only do we have to make do without quite a number of things which we manage to forget,

and not only do we have to cram into small and boring spaces when it rains (which it does almost daily in the mountains), but we also have to figure out how to even get where we are going.

This is, of course, when Jonathan is driving--and parking. 

Now if Anna were driving, the travel trailer would be parked right up near the road without trying to navigate S-shaped curves between both living and dead trees or trying to get the travel trailer through dips that are too deep for a 30-ft. trailer. 

But when Jonathan goes to the mountains, he and the children are determined to find the best places to camp, and somehow they manage to get there even though that process is an adventure in itself!

This is how we got in and out of Monday's campsite!

The campsite was idyllic...

but we had to pile logs in the dip, and both the older girls and older boys knelt by the tires, pulling out this split log and that one and hurrying to put one after another in front of the tires, while the driver inched along,
with certain parts of the hitch or leveling devices scraping ominously in the dirt at times.

I wandered restlessly off under the trees and into the nearby meadow, thinking that perhaps this once the driver should have listened to me, but little by little, he and the children made it back to the campsite they had chosen. 

"We don't have anything else to do!" Jonathan argued nonchalantly.

So I stayed away for a couple minutes and then came back to watch and "help," then left again when the scraping of parts of the trailer and juggling of logs got to be too much for me, as the endeavor stretched into nearly an hour to get back through the trees.
Challenge, folks! Men--and boys--and tomboy girls--need challenge!

I peered under the travel trailer after it was settled in place, expecting to see it torn to pieces or scrunched in some sort of way, but it seemed to still be in one piece, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Boys will be boys, you know, even the grown up ones.

And we girls just have to let them be; after all, it's just a travel trailer, and once it was leveled, we had such a lovely evening, because it was SUCH a perfect spot.

It was right next to a stream, with trees and meadow, wild roses and other flowers blooming, and many willow shrubs all along the wide stream. A deer splashed through the stream or nosed through the willows more than once.

 Yes, when the Lucas children go camping with their parents, they automatically and joyously get some good missionary training. They hike long miles, curl up with good books, make do in multiple ways, sleep out in the open if they choose, eat new foods such as various kinds of fish, and get tired and dirty.


We see beautiful sights and learn new things and worship God over and over.
 
We listen to Rose pick out "The Old Rugged Cross" on her mandolin, sing patriotic songs, and roast marshmallows.

I read story after story out loud from one section of Dorcas Smucker's book, Sunlight Through Dusty Windows, (a three-books-in-one) about how their family of eight decided to spend four months helping at a boys' home in Kenya--

and ended up adopting one of the boys into their Oregonian Mennonite pastor's home.

And Crystal remembered over and over things she herself experienced in Africa on her trips to sell and distribute Bibles with "Uncle" Pete Marais and Aunt Esther, "Oom Piet," as he was affectionately called. 

The Bible-selling group had camped out for weeks at a time in Africa. 

Crystal found out from a phone message that "Oom Piet" went to be with the Lord Monday morning while we were camping in the mountains, and Crystal cried.

All day she kept remembering and telling us about Oom Piet. 

She kept remembering things about him, especially since she just got back from spending a week in Pheonix with her cousin Amaris who is at a clinic there for Lyme treatments. While there with Amaris and Candace, the three cousins looked again at photos of their three trips to Africa and watched the videos they had taken there.

Just recently "Oom Piet" appreciated music videos the cousins had sent him of the Morley cousins and some parents singing hymns. Those videos cheered his last days that were so full of weakness and pain. His wife, "Aunt Esther," expressed deep appreciation. 

And I wonder, will one of my children sense God's call to take God's Word to those without it?

Will they be willing to lay personal comforts aside to share the gospel and to take God's Word to hungry hearts?

Perhaps our excursions into the wilds of Colorado mountains will help to prepare them.

Perhaps the stories we read of others who sacrificed and went to other lands will help to guide them into their future life work, whether here at home or abroad.
Perhaps "Oom Piet's" death will spark a blaze that will not go out. 

Flags by the Wreckage of a B-17 Bomber

 Over July 4th weekend, Jonathan was able to take time to take our family on a little camping trip in the Laramie Mountains in northern Colorado. 

Early Monday morning, the family got up early to hit the trail a little after 7 o'clock. Jonathan and the children planned to hike to a site where a B-17 bomber crashed during World War II, when eight airmen were training and ran into a storm and lost their lives. 

Debris from the crash was strewn for many, many yards down the rocky slope.

Jonathan and the boys identified wheels, fuselage, axles, and other airplane parts rusted with the weather.

The names of the airmen were inscribed on rocks or stone. 

Little red, white and blue American flags were placed respectfully by parts of the wreckage.

Somehow, those little flags brought a whole new perspective to the scene. 

The little flags just made all the difference.

They turned the site of the wreckage into something special, 

hopeful,

beautiful,

sacred.

It wasn't just a wreck now.

It was a memorial.
It was a place where the dead did not die in vain. 

It was a site that had purpose and meaning and beauty.

And in the middle of the wreckages that we see on a daily basis on the news or newsfeeds,

the protests and the graffiti and the fires and the toppled monuments, 

there are still those who are placing flags.

Not flags of surrender, but flags of purpose.
Not flags for just certain lives that matter, but flags of courage and devotion and hope for all mankind.

Now there is a mountain trail, little and little-known, a trail to the site of a wrecked bomber.

The trail runs around Twin Lakes and along a beautiful mountain creek.

It's a trail that leads us not to where men have destroyed lives, but to where men have given their lives.

It's a trail that leads not just to wreckage, but to reflection, devotion, and hope.

July 4th Decorations--the Colors of Freedom

I'm not the greatest when it comes to decorating my house.

First of all, I can think of more important things to do. 

But all at the same time, I know how much I have loved it when my girls have decorated and spruced up the place with their special seasonal touches. 

However, they have moved on to more important things, too, I guess, and that leaves me trying to freshen up the house seasonally myself. It drives me a little bit crazy, because it is NOT my thing.
I spent at least two hours a couple weeks ago trying to decorate and it drove me batty thinking what a waste of time it might have been.
However, this is what I came up with...The bouquet above on the hymnal rack was my favorite.

The walls,

the top of the piano,

and around the wagon wheel by the piano are some places to add a seasonal touch.

I wouldn't have to redecorate except that who really wants Easter decor still up for July Fourth??

Above the kitchen cabinets.

Well, at least I tried.

Once it was done and the boxes of decor reorganized and stashed in the basement,

I liked how the house looked.

It's also one little way of remembering what our country has stood for 

these many years--God and freedom!

While others choose to trash our country and its historical monuments, including those of Columbus and Thomas Jefferson, we will still set up flags and celebrate with red, white and blue--

the colors of freedom!

Cactus--and Songs--in the Wilderness

Jonathan found this beauty in the wilderness-type area where he was working a week or two ago.

I couldn't get over how beautiful even cactus can be when it is blooming!

Even where all around is barren, God has His bits of beauty,
and there are seasons of beauty as well.
Not all wilderness is barren, and not every season is winter!
I find that for me, when it seems I'm on overwhelm or in some wilderness,
that is when God's Word comes alive.
That is when hymns mean more.
It's why I've tried to help my children hide God's Word in their heart, and it's why we're trying to learn hymns by heart--so that we will have blossoms even in our deserts.

Danny and Hannah are putting together a song notebook of songs and hymns we are learning.
I'm doing them in ABC order right now.
"Amazing Grace"
"Be Still My Soul"
"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

"Day by Day"
We are copying the hymn and then decorating it with an appropriate picture from my file
or with a photo that Danny or Hannah have taken.

Today I was on overwhelm trying to prepare for the weekend, and finally when the children were outside and things were quiet, I got my Bible and opened it up to Psalm 121.
"I will lift up my eyes to the hills.
From whence cometh my help?
My help cometh from the Lord Who made heaven and earth.
He shall not allow your foot to be moved. He Who keeps Israel shall not slumber.
Behold, He Who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."
He will always be watching over us, preserving us from evil. He will preserve our souls!
Even the desert has its seasons of blossoming as the rose.

And when you cannot sleep, He does not sleep either. 

He is watching over you!

 Take heart. 

If you are going through a desert season, remember that even cactus will bloom!