The First Work Week

(Boxes of strawberry plants.  So far I have helped plant over 20,000)

(One of the older strawberry fields)

(The backend of the tractor we sit in to plant)

(View of Bohringers fruit farm from Vroman’s Nose)

Blueberry Bramble

One week into the summer, I have dirt-stained hands and a sun-baked nose.  Each morning my car flies over the backroads snaking through the low mountains I grew up on until I reach the valley.  From down in the strawberry field, the world is diminished into a circle of farm land fenced in by the same mountains, all of which are encompassed by a bright blue bowl of sky.  The early summer sun smiles down from on high and my heart sings.

Work on a farm isn’t easy.  By noon, the odd breaks in my skin ooze blood as I wash my hands for lunch, but within an hour I won’t be able to see the blood for the dirt caking around the wounds. It is work, though. The labor is honest with visible results; my sense of accomplishment is just as real as the sweat beading down my back.  For the first time in my life, a hard day’s work is just that.  Nothing more, nothing less.

As the summer goes on, I’m sure I will lose my rose-colored glasses and there will be days that I complain about my worn muscles and dust-filled eyes. Today, however, learning how to help living things grow, discovering new ways to be a good steward of the land God has entrusted to us, and...I could go on line after line, gushing unintelligibly about my love for my God and all the good things He has made.

This wouldn’t be a true post by yours truly without a little lesson from the week.  Yesterday morning found me in the blueberry field, clipping away at invasive saplings and grapevines.  I worked my way down the row of bushes until I came to a cluster completely overwhelmed by dried morning glory, young vines, and even ivy.  The blueberries were almost wholly choked out, but as I began to slowly free the bushes from the bramble, I also began to understand something I think might be almost profound. 

 If I were to grab a fistful of the antagonizing plants and pull them out, I would kill the very plant I’m trying to save.  The detangling process takes time and care and effort and I remembered the parable of the good seed choked out by weeds.  Never before have I understood how truly overpowering invasive plants can be.  The anxieties and woes of this world are like that.  God freely gives each of His children a blueberry bush of purposeful joy, of eternal perspective, of desire for His glory. And yet, we have other seeds in the soil of our lives that seek to leech off the good plant, to climb over it to reach better light and support.  We can’t help those seeds being there, but if we are poor caretakers, the blueberries will swiftly be overgrown, unrecognizable for the plants we failed to nip in the bud.  

It’s the beginning of a thought that might, in fact, be beyond basic, but it is also profound. At least, it is profound to me.

The Blue Monster

“Do you ever feel like a sad, blue monster?”

“All the time.”

Note that the kid who answered that question is eight years old.  All the same...I relate, kid.  I relate so hard.

And yet, so much else is racing through my mind.

This morning, one of my friends asked me what one word would sum up my entire freshman semester at EBI.  Why do people do that? Why do we whittle things so far down that we can barely grasp what they are meant to embody?  My word was unexpected.

I have grown, but not in the cataclysmic ways I imagined I would.   This growth is a seed, just barely dipped in a stream, tucked away in warm earth, just beginning to break down the outer shell with its very first shoot. When I take stock of all the files waiting for storage space in my cluttered mind, God is ever present.  He has made me softer, more willing to stop and listen than to hurry up and fix it.

At the very beginning of the semester another new friend encouraged me to write down wisdom in a notebook separate from my school notes.  I didn’t.  But at the very front of my Bible, I have written two things that have been beaten over my head over and over the past few months.  I’ll share them with you and end this post with that.

1) Renewal of fellowship has always been God’s plan. He never planned to not send Christ.  This is integral and foundational and simple and also comforting.

2) Draw courage from God’s past faithfulness.  He is consistent.  If He’s been faithful once, He’ll be faithful again.  And that’s that.

Listen up, kids

This post is late. Very, very late. But sit on down and let me learn you a thing or two about vomit.

Oh yeah. Vomit.

Thing number one: if you leave vomit in an enclosed area for an extended period of time, when you open that area you will be slapped across the face with the scent of aged puke. 

Two weeks ago, that is exactly what happened when I opened the upper chapel bathroom, bright and early Monday morning.  All I needed to do was to make sure there was enough toilet paper.  Instead, the scent of foul chicken and stuffing forced its offensive tendrils up my nose.

Thing number two: if vomit has been left unattended in a sink for a period of twelve hours or more, it will be nearly impossible to clean without a paint scraper and a nose plug.

But I did it.  I got me some rubber gloves and a bottle of cleaner, and I did the best I could.  Come to find out, the toilet was entirely clean.  Not a trace of vomit on the thing.  My mystery puker decided his or her best course of action was to hurl their cookies into the unfortunately small sink, and finish the job in the trash can.  I sincerely hope they also had diarrhea, because that’s the only reason I will accept for the state of everything.

After I did my best to clean the sink, it still had to be plunged by maintenance.  We laughed about it through our disgust and you might think, “Surely that qualifies as a solid Monday.”

You’re wrong.

Tops an hour later, I dropped my phone (license, school ID and all) into an entirely separate toilet AS I WAS TRYING TO TAKE IT OUT OF MY POCKET SO IT WOULDN’T  DO JUST THAT!

And I said, “Why, Jesus?”

But it’s fine and I’m still using the toilet phone.