Little House Updates and Virtual Photo Tour

My husband and I made some renovations to the Little House this past winter. My goals were to make the building more functional, spacious, and welcoming for myself and those who meet and gather here. This past week I returned to meeting with Directees in-person and it was such a joy to welcome people to this space again. 

If you live in Central PA and are interested in exploring Spiritual Direction, I'd love to have you stop by for a conversation. I also meet virtually with individuals from all over the world. Interested? Email me or comment below to begin your journey. (Chripczuk.Kelly@gmail.com)  

Virtual Tour:

This is the Little House, my private office and meeting space. It's situated just off our driveway, between our main house and garage. This spring, my husband built this bench and planters to make the entrance more welcoming. 

We were able to make a new seating area (see photo at beginning of post) by removing this old cooktop stove and the cabinet. For now, the wall and fan vent hole have been covered with plywood and painted one of my favorite shades of blue. The whole project was briefly stalled when we got distracted by the idea of placing a little round porthole window in that vent hole. My husband also built the ladder bookshelf (see photo above) that allows me to keep my hoard of papers and books near but not on top of my desk at all times. 

Another big space-saving change included removing a built-in desk that stuck out of this closet (below) and installing a closet door. The closet still offers storage for books and files, but removing the unused desktop bought me several square feet of floor space. It's hard to explain in pictures, but one dream I have for the future is removing this corner entirely and installing a loft bed for over-night guests. 

One of my favorite updates is the new writing desk my husband built (below). After using a child-sized desk for the past seven years, this spacious desk (with my own real office chair) comes as a welcome relief. Plus, I was able to paint it one of my favorite colors: Magenta!

I was planning to sell my old desk to cover the cost of some of these updates, but when I turned it around to move it out of the Little House, I noticed it makes a perfect little altar-table (see below). Now it's just right for a candle, glass of water, and poem or two. 

I also invested in new seating, finally updating my old, oversized Ikea chairs with these spiffy blue Mid-Century modern chairs (below) found on Facebook Marketplace. I'm still on the look-out for new-to-me seating that will be more comfortable than these current chairs. Currently, the Little House comfortably accommodates small groups of about 5-6 adults (message me for details about reserving the space for your group to use). 

This little corner (below) is the last thing visitors see when leaving the Little House and the painting sums up my heart completely. I love having this space for reading, writing, and praying. But most of all, I love offering a space of peace, joy, love, and rest in the midst of this busy overwhelming world. I hope you'll visit some day - in person or online. 

Questions to carry:

What kind of space does your heart long for? How do you reflect the spirit of God in the spaces you've been given?

What I Wish I'd Said

“What’s with the bracelet?” he asked. 

The cuff in question, made of brightly colored fabric and secured with two snaps, circled my left wrist.  Across the top, the word, ‘joy’ was written on a piece of frayed ivory canvas.  I was making my rounds at physical therapy - moving from arm bike, to squats and leg lifts – when the young therapist posed his question. 

“I made it,” I said – an honest answer, but short of the full truth. 

“Oh,” he said, “do you make jewelry?”

The conversation moved on and did not circle back around, the moment was lost.  I was left mulling my reticent reply and wishing I’d been clearer.

//

Have you ever lost something and, when you found it again, you wanted to do everything you could to keep from losing it again?  That's how it is for me and joy.  So, I made a bracelet in all the brightest colors, the happy, vibrant ones, and wrote the word “joy” on it.  I wear it to remember to hold on to joy.    

//

I don’t know what that young man would have said had I unloaded my frightfully serious reasoning on him that day.  But, I wish I had, because it was the truth and sharing truth with others often helps solidify it in the deepest parts of ourselves.  

This summer, as I prepare to transition from working at home to working at a church again, I’ve been looking over these past seven years of life and taking an inventory of sorts.  What have I been given in this time that I want to carry with me for the work ahead?

One these gifts is joy - the reminder to cultivate and choose it, to recognize it not as an optional add-on to the spiritual life, but as a fruit of the spirit, an essential marker of the presence (or absence) of God in each of our lives.  To remind myself of this truth, I made a small painting to hang in my new office, a painting filled with gorgeous colors, patterns and textures and one simple word: joy.

   

Turn Toward the Light (Do Not Be Afraid)

How did the rose

ever open its heart

and give to this world 

all its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

against its being.

Otherwise,

we all remain 

too frightened. 

- Hafiz

The world needs us all; every heart open, fragrant, bright with the gift of pure being.  

May the light of Love rest upon you this day.  

May the light of your own beautiful soul be an encouragement to all who cross your path today.

*   *   *

Things have been quiet on the blog for some time now.  Be sure to sign up for my newsletter and stay tuned later this week for an update on all the new things happening behind the scenes here at This Contemplative Life.    

My Daughter, Annie Dillard, and I

My twelve-year-old daughter says there are four eggs in the nest outside her bedroom window.  I believe her, because she's who one sits and watches, keeping an eye on the world around her. 

//

On the night after the Parkland Florida shooting, my oldest two, my husband, and I sprawled around the wood stove talking about kids who struggle, kids who sometimes perpetrate unfathomable acts of violence. 

“There’s a boy in my class who seems really sad sometimes,” my daughter said.  “I ask him if he’s ok, I tell him I will listen if he wants to talk.  But he doesn’t want to.  I don’t know what else to do.”  She shrugged her shoulders, letting the weight of seeing and knowing another’s pain and isolation rise and fall. 

The mother in me wanted to pick up that weight, like a strongman lifting a car off a trapped child.  I wanted to lift the burden from her shoulders and carry it far away, toss it off a canyon cliff, never to be seen again.    

Instead, I said, “I’m glad you ask him.  Sometimes that’s all you can do.”  

//

During spring conferences, a teacher said she’d recently paired my daughter with a student who’s only integrated into mainstream classrooms for science.  They worked together for a single lab with his classroom aide keeping close watch.  The teacher, also observing, noticed how my daughter deliberately slowed her pace, waiting for the other student to process before moving on to the next step.  In other words, she treated him like a real partner. 

“Some kids just rush through and do all the work,” the teacher said.  “But she was so patient, she just let him work at his own pace.”  After they finished, the student’s aide told the teacher, “That girl is the kindest person I’ve ever seen.”

Tears sprang to my eyes when she said that and later, when I retold the story to my husband, he got chills up and down his arms.  They weren’t chills or tears of pride, but the kind that come when truth strikes close to the bone.    

//   

I recently started reading Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk and it’s filled parts of me I didn’t know were empty.  Dillard’s work makes me want to not only write better but live better.  She writes as one who watches and listens before asking gentle, curious questions of the world around her.  She reminds me of my daughter. 

I was only three sentences in to her first essay when this small fact stuck its foot out, causing my imagination to stumble and pause: 

“Sometimes [a weasel] lives in his den for two days without leaving.”

Now there’s something to write about, I thought.  Something for a poem maybe. 

Who knew weasels have a private life, hidden beneath the surface of the world?  The very idea dazzled me.  Here, I thought, is something to explore.  But, reading on, I realized Dillard knows the weasel in a way I never will, having both researched it and watched it in a pond near her house. 

I have no pond near my house.  I’ve never seen a weasel except maybe in a zoo.  I can write ideas about the weasel, but I can’t write directly about the weasel (not honestly, at least) because I don’t know the weasel.  Seated here by my office window, I suspect I’m a good deal removed from the nearest weasel-viewing-locale.  For now, I’ll leave the weasels to Annie. 

I’ll write instead about what I can see, about what I know.  Today, for instance, the gray hen is foraging in our yard and a pair of sparrows paused in the shrub outside passing something (a seed?) from beak to beak.  Dispassionate snow flurries are falling.  It’s a lovely snow, the kind you long for in December, but it’s April, and if I hear one more complaint about this late winter weather, I swear I’ll despair because I’m holding my breath for spring and complaining wastes air. 

Looking up and a little further out, I can see the awning outside my daughter’s window where an eager pair of house wrens built their nest weeks ago.  I can’t see the mother, but I know she’s there, sitting on those four eggs in the snow and cold because life depends on it.  I know she is there just as I know I am here, watching and listening, asking gentle, curious questions.  These children, my daughter and sons, they are my eggs, my weasels; they make me want to not only write better, but live better.  

Miss. Ann's Zinnia's (The Kingdom of God is Like . . . )

Sunday afternoon I left my husband with seed packets of Zinnias and Dahlias and walked up, across the yard, to look for a spade in our overflowing garage.  The planting of those flowers, four packets, was what I requested for Mother’s Day this year. 

I don’t know why planting seems, for me, an impossible task.  Maybe it’s that simple act of letting go and watching the impossible seed fall into darkness; maybe it’s the familiar struggle of facing an unknown future.  Whatever it is, my husband plants the garden each year and I, in time, tend it. 

Walking up from the garden, across the green expanse of lawn, I looked over at our neighbor’s yard.  They have a small, fenced in, vegetable garden and the wife, Ann, has a separate flower garden.  Their garden, like most in early spring, is a miracle waiting to happen – a tilled expanse of soil, a pregnant pause.  My eyes saw the emptiness there, the open waiting space, but in my mind I remembered the Zinnias. 

During our first summer here, we planted a good-sized vegetable garden filled with the practical means of nutrition.  Our neighbors did the same in their fenced-in plot, but around the outside edge of the fence grew large, splashy, red, purple and pink flowers – a fiesta of color that started blooming in late summer and stood strong into the fall. 

Oh how I envied Miss. Ann's Zinnias.  I eyed her flowers hungrily and finally, in September as the flowers were beginning to fade, asked if I might over and cut a bunch.  From that moment on, I was hooked. 

The following summer, I bought a packet of seeds and grew my own riot of reds and pinks.  I cut them and filled our house with vases.  I carried them to friends’ houses.  Everyone loved the Zinnias.

Then, last year, we made a farm stand for selling fresh, free-range chicken eggs.  I again planted my Zinnias (or rather, my husband did) and, when they grew and bloomed, I started cutting large happy bunches of purples and pinks, oranges and yellows and selling them in old tin cans at the farm stand for $1 each. 

It was a real steal for fresh cut flowers and they flew off of the farm stand’s two tilted shelves.  A friend suggested I should charge more.  But I refrained. 

I was already making a profit, but, what’s more, I know what it’s like to not be able to afford fresh flowers.  I know, also, how beauty feeds the soul.  I also know the feeling of finding a wonderful deal, how it opens our hearts and minds, makes us feel the expansive mystery of goodness and provision in the world that’s so often buried in layer after layer of unmet need. 

I wanted people to feel what I felt in my garden, the sensation of wonder and delight, the absurdity of so much color available for mere ornamentation.  

Returning to the garden with the trowel in hand that Sunday afternoon, I thought, the kingdom of God is like those Zinnias.  The Kingdom of God – heaven in our midst – blazes and waves in the place where it is planted.  It attracts the eye, captures the heart, fills those who are awake enough to notice, with longing.  The Kingdom of God is like a packet of seeds, bought for $1.49, that yields one hundred fold.  The kingdom of God is color cut and watered in an old tin can, bright joy on the side of the road bought with a handful of change – a deal too good to be true.   

But We Have This Treasure (What Happened At My House This Weekend)

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. 2 Corinthians 4:7

A petite Episcopalian priest and a divorced mother of two share one couch.  A retired history professor and editor reclines in a corner chair.  Beside him, a pastor's wife, worship leader and self-described 'queen of part-time jobs' sits cross-legged in a stiff Ikea chair.  Next to her is another recent retiree, a musician and woodworker trying to get his legs back under him after a lifetime of work in the non-profit sector.  

Beside me is a Grandmother with rheumatoid arthritis who works full time in the field of medical writing.  My dog, Coco, sprawls sleepily on the couch between us, circuiting the room throughout the day to give and receive her fair share of attention.  

We get to know each other over the course of the morning, beginning deep and going deeper still, with each of us likely sharing more than we intended to when the day began and yet finding ourselves relieved and grateful for it.  By lunch time, there's a general sense of excitement and conversation flows freely.  

Then, in the afternoon, we share our gifts - by which I mean, the writing we've labored over and likely felt more than a little scared to bring to share.  One by one we pass white pages with black words printed on them, such deceptively simple dressing for expressions so near and dear to each writers' heart.  

This is when the amazement begins.  

The Episcopal priest, weighted down with the church's good work of Lent and impending Easter, labors daily on the creation of a science fiction novel.  More than twelve chapters in already, she shares hopes of adding a prequel and sequel.  As we read, a world unfolds (two planets to be exact), double-spaced across several pages and I'm amazed - not because it's either good or bad, but because it exists at all.  And when the time comes for questions and feedback, the woman's lovely face lights up at each comment and every critique is welcomed as an opportunity to improve, an invitation to communicate more clearly.

This is how it goes for more than two hours.  Pages passed around a circle and one by one the people in my living room are revealed to possess hidden treasure that shines and sparkles as they unveil a wide range of words.  One writes so eloquently about friendship and music transcending a racial divide, that several readers gasp and tears spring to more than one set of eyes.  Another writes a simple and sparse description of her fast from social media and we all find within her gentle words an invitation - what might we do with our hands and minds if we simply had more time?   

Each story leaves us, like treasure hunters having stumbled across a rare jewel, longing for more.  

"I should've brought all thirty pages," the retired professor says, obviously delighted by our genuine interest in his story.  

"I only just recently resurrected this novel," the single mother says, "I'm not sure when I can commit more time to work on it."  But we all, dazzled by the mystery woven in a few short pages, silently wish with baited breath and pleading eyes, for more. 

At the end of the day, there's a palpable sense of encouragement, as we circuit the room one last time sharing our goals and 'takeaways' from the day.  Although it's a writing retreat, it's been and always is, a spiritual experience for me.  I am left with a profound sense of honor and gratitude, not unlike that which I felt entering and leaving the hospital rooms as a chaplain.

Within the human soul is a world of depth, meaning, and wonder - a small glimpse of divinity mirrored in the human being fully alive. Not just some humans possess this gift, we all do.  I used to only see the great divide in that verse from Paul to the church of Corinth - the vast disparity between those earthen jars and God's extraordinary power.  But, to read it that way, is to miss the point, at least in part. 

Now I see it from another angle - God has placed treasure in these jars of clay and sometimes, on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of March, the moment will be just right for that glorious power to shine forth and it will be all you can do to keep from squinting at the glory revealed as sunlight dances across a room full of diamonds, a gathering of simple, human souls.   

This past weekend Andi Cumbo-Floyd and I hosted our annual central PA writers' retreat.  Sign up for my newsletter if you'd like to hear about future events and, if you're a writer, consider attending our next event June 23-5 on Andi's farm in Radiant, VA.  

In Defense of Fun (#SmallWonder Link-up)

I had coffee with one of my former college professors a few weeks ago.  I walked down the road to the little corner café and we sat for a while talking about life and direction.  We’re both in the midst of a murky time of transition – his post retirement, mine at the end of the season of parenting preschool aged children.   This friend, a retired professor Christian Spirituality and Ministry who’s penned a biblical commentary for a well-known series, likes to tease me about the fact that I went to a “better seminary” than him.

When it came up that morning in the coffee shop I smiled and shrugged.  “Yeah,” I said, “and look where it got me – selling flowers and eggs along the side of the road!”

He smiled and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “that’s important too.”

He’s right.  It is.  And I knew it even as I sat there making light of it.    

//

John built the farm stand early this summer and I started out trying to sell eggs and produce, but sales were slow, by which I mean nearly non-existent.  But then the two seed packets of Zinnias we planted grew and started blooming in a wild array of pinks and oranges.  I soon added cut flower arrangements to the stand first in old glass canning jars, then in recycled soup cans.  I called them “Tin Can Bouquets” and sold them for $1 each. 

In late August, a friend of mine discovered the bouquets and posted a picture of them online, sales picked up dramatically.  Some days it felt like I could hardly keep the stand stocked with flowers.  All in all, I’m confident we made more money in flowers this summer than in produce and eggs combined. 

//

I realized something amazing this summer when I sold my first carton of eggs to a stranger who happened to stop by because of the sign in our yard.  When you sell something to another person – in this case, eggs – you’re in some small way, entering into their life.  The woman who stopped by took my eggs into her home, put them in her refrigerator and they became part of her meal planning and dinner, lunch or breakfast.  A product of mine became part of her life and I don’t even know her name.  The same goes for writing a book, I guess, or selling flowers, each product offers a chance to impact someone else’s life. 

//

A few weeks ago I told a small group of friends about my plan to self-publish Chicken Scratch this November 7^th.  After taking time to think about my goals for the book and how I would measure its success, I had found I was surprised by my own answer.    

“What I most want,” I told them, “is for it to be fun.” I shrugged my shoulders at the word fun, like it was a small thing.  Then with my face scrunched up, almost as if in apology, I added, “I think it’s really important.” 

My friends agreed.  

We talked about how fun can seem frivolous, unimportant, when compared to the serious work needing to be done.  These friends work in the non-profit sector, they know a thing or two about serious work, and yet they agreed, we do need more beauty and joy, more fun in our lives. 

I used to think being a good person meant doing all of the serious work first.  Then maybe, if I was lucky, there would be a few spare moments at the end of the day or the end of a productive life to do something “just for fun;”  to travel, to rest, to play.  I still find myself thinking that way when the list of good and important, even necessary, things that must be done is long.  (Is it ever not long?) 

But I understand now that fun belongs on that list too.  Fun is good.  Fun is important.  Fun is necessary. So necessary that we may even need to practice at it until we learn to engage in fun, not as a form of escapism or entertainment, but as a way to refill our souls, giving us hope, energy and courage to continue on in the rest of the good and serious work needing to be done.   

“It kinda blows my mind,” I told my friends that day.  “Of all the things for sale at the farm stand, all of the useful, practical food items, what people bought most was beauty.” 

I like to think of those tin can bouquets -  the ones my friend bought two and three at a time and took to meetings all over town, the others bought by people I never met or even saw - those pink and purple happy Zinnia faces are smiling all around Boiling Springs and Carlisle, on kitchen counters, dining room tables and goodness only knows where else.  What a joy it is to spread a little fun into pockets of the world I would otherwise never reach. 

*   *   *

Welcome to the #SmallWonder link-up.  

What if we chose to deliberately look for small moments of wonder, the small sparks of presence, of delight or sorrow, of true humanity in which we meet God?  

That's my proposal - that we gather here each week to share one moment of Wonder from each of our days.  You're invited to link-up a brief post about a small moment of wonder.  Don't worry if your post is too long, too short, or not just right - you're welcome to come as you are.  

While you're here, please do take a look around and encourage at least one other blogger with a comment.  Thanks for being part of our community!  

Seeing Better (#SmallWonder Link-Up)

"I could die tomorrow,” I told her.  “Without ever having pink glasses.”

The sales associate looked at me with her head cocked, eyebrows raised and conceded the point. 

I’ve had the same small, brown glasses frames since 2011. I chose them not long before the twins were born in that end-of-pregnancy flurry of getting everything done before life changes irrevocably.  Dentist? Check.  Glasses? Check. 

In the exam room the optometrist looked up, surprised, from his chart.  “This says I haven’t seen you since 2013?” he asks. 

“Yep.” I reply.

“And you bought contacts then?  How often do you change them?  Do you have any left?”  He voice conveys incredulity.

“Well, yeah.  I don’t wear my contacts much.”  I fumble through my memory bank, drawing a blank.  “I don’t know,” I finally reply, “I had twins, so the last couple of years are a little blurry.” 

The answer seems to satisfy. 

In the sales room, a young woman follows me around among the frames.  I ask her what’s “in” these days and she tells me bigger plastic frames. 

“What are you looking for?” she asks, calm and detached behind her half-framed lenses of dark blue metal.  Her dark hair is long and perfectly straight. 

“I want something fun,” I said, “some color.”

What I really wanted, before I even walked in the door, was pink glasses.  I wanted happy glasses, but I wasn’t sure I dared get them.  What if I made a mistake?    

I feel like a failure when the optometrist pulls up letters I can’t read.  Blinking, I watch letters flip and wiggle like so many small black ants waving their legs.  I make random guesses, occasionally upping my odds by offering two answers at once.  “Um, I think it’s an E . . . or a P?”  One line I cannot read at all.  The exam room is so strangely intimate, dimly lit, with the optometrist scooting around on his rolling stool, peering into my eyes with a little light that he moves in circles like a magic wand.   

My left eye, weak as ever, has worsened again, but, good news, I’m not yet in need of bifocals. 

Back in the sale’s room, the associate hands me purple glasses and offers red.  But I don’t want purple glasses, purple glasses don’t make me happy and red glasses bring to mind Sally Jesse Raphael (please tell me I’m not the only one who remembers THAT).  Then she motions toward an almost translucent light pink pair, but before she can pick them up, I say, “I think I had those glasses in fourth grade and I don’t really want to go back to that.”

In the end, I whittle it down to two pairs, identical in shape, one navy blue and the other a cheery magenta.  Both frames have funky squiggly patterns in complementary colors along the temples.  Both pairs are cute, but the blue look better on me.

Still, I hem and haw.  A second associate is called over.  She put the glasses on her own face for me.  “See,” she says, “these blue ones kinda blend in but with the pink ones, the frames are all you see.”  I see what sees and know she's right.  Then she adds a third pair into the mix, shaped like the others, but in a deeper shade of purple.  "These make a nice compromise," she says.  But her well-intended suggestion only further confuses things for me.    

I circle the room, I sit again and slip frames off and on. 

“I’m turning forty in a year,” I tell the original associate, “maybe these will be my mid-life crisis glasses.”  I'm only half-joking.  Do I like the pink glasses or do I only like the ‘idea’ of pink glasses? 

“You’ll want to think about the clothes you wear too, not just what you have one today,” the second woman adds. 

“But pink goes with everything, right?” I ask, “Except for red?”

The younger woman agrees. “Pink goes with everything in my book,” she says.  I find her patience endearing.

I apologize for taking so long.  Then, finally, “I want the pink ones,” I say, scrunching my face up as if to offer an apology.

“I knew you did,” she says.  

(I knew I did too.)  

(Friends - it's my birthday this week!  Hop over to my facebook page to see a picture of me in my new glasses and, if you haven't done so already, LIKE MY PAGE.  I've been hovering near 600 page likes for a long time now and there's nothing I'd like more for my birthday than to finally cross that 600 mark.  Thanks!)
   

*   *   *   *

I'm super excited to be joining with Andi Cumbo-Floyd and Shawn Smucker to organize a weekend writer's retreat this summer at God's Whisper Farm in the beautiful mountains of Virginia.  Visit Andi's website for more info!

Welcome to the #SmallWonder link-up.  

What if we chose to deliberately look for small moments of wonder, the small sparks of presence, of delight or sorrow, of true humanity in which we meet God?  

That's my proposal - that we gather here each week to share one moment of Wonder from each of our days.  You're invited to link-up a brief post about a small moment of wonder.  Don't worry if your post is too long, too short, or not just right - you're welcome to come as you are.  

While you're here, please do take a look around and encourage at least one other blogger with a comment.   

Gather (Love's Bouquet)

 

Hunt out bright blooms, big and small. 

Snip.

Clutch in one hand, while

cutting with the other. 

Feel the prick of thorns.  Inside,

grab the new turquoise vase with an hourglass figure. 

Fill it with water – a tall, cool drink for thirsty stems.

Strip leaves.

Gather again, first Spirea – pale pink and dusty mauve - 

then small white flowers resembling Queen Ann’s Lace.  Last,

three pale roses almost 

spent. 

Sleep now as night

falls across yard and house and the tall, turquoise vase.

All night long, petals fall, dispersing perfectly of their own accord.

Awaken to a kitchen scattered with petals.  

Old, wooden kitchen island

transformed into a lover’s bed, 

a wedding aisle strewn with pink.

Ah, love!

Love grew beauty in the yard.

Love gathered. 

Love held. 

Love fell and

spread of its own accord. 

Love woos;

love gathers the gatherer.

Gratitude (the first day of shorts weather)

. . . for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his. . . 

- Gerard Manly Hopkins

 

Long and leggy, doe-eyed, 

she walks with confidence, 

a gentle fawn, a young colt.

He is all angles, sharp protrusions, 

limbs like the branches

of a young tree.

They both wear socks 

pulled up high because 

they don't know any better.

 

And then there are the little ones.  

Isaiah with his gentle roundness - 

a gum drop, a plum, a dumpling, we say

searching for words to express.

Levi, bare-chested in the sun

his shoulders thrown back, goggles on,

he stands on the picnic table, "working."

These ones pad along on bare feet, 

toes like ripe berries,

soft and sweet, fresh.

 

It is the first day of shorts weather,

the beginning of shoe-less summer

and all around me limbs unveil 

earth's sweetness, lovely.  

This post is linked with Five Minute Fridays on the prompt "Grateful." Click over to read more posts.

Sticks and Stones (on Beauty that Speaks)

I woke up early on the morning I was scheduled to preach and drove to the spacious, wooded park a few blocks from our house.  In preparation for speaking on the story of Elijah’s widow, I wanted to gather enough sticks to spread across a make-shift altar space, creating a tableau of sorts with a children’s book I planned to read and a small tree.  

I was planning to speak about hope, but not the kind that soars.

 

I wanted to talk about the kind of hope that shows up among the sticks and stones of our lives, the few drops of oil and crumbs of flour; the kind of hope that dwells in the dried out, broken places and is only found in the looking.  

Pulling up and parking, though, I noticed a peculiar absence of branches, even in the most likely places, under the old stately trees at one end of the park.  But I got out anyway and started wandering around, my head bowed, scanning the ground for useable materials.  

Once I really started looking, I saw sticks everywhere and dressed in my Sunday best, I bent and gathered a good armful.  Arriving at church, I spread a table cloth on a long folding table and laid out my wares.  The Carrot Seed, by Ruth Krauss stood on a small wooden stand and behind it the avocado tree planted from a seed my husband salvaged from the compost bin.  

Taking the sticks out slowly I dropped them gently onto the table, making a good old mess and letting more than a few tumble to the ground.  Bits of bark scattered and clinging leaves drifted gently to the floor.  

There wasn’t anything beautiful about those sticks, not in a conventional sense.  

But there was a strange beauty in their brokenness, a beauty in the way they captured the way so many of us feel in hopeless times – dried up, broken and emptied of life. 

I imagined that for some in my congregation that day, hope was like a seed, small and expectant, and for others perhaps it was like a tree, sprouting and green.  But for others yet, I imagined that hope felt brittle and barren like it must have for Elijah’s widow who hunted and pecked along the ground, gathering just enough sticks to cook one last meal.  

I’m not sure if those sticks spoke to anyone that day, but they spoke to me.  

They reminded me that when words fail, beauty speaks, even the strange, stark beauty of broken, barren things.  Proclamation occurs, not just in the form of words and ideas, but also in images and icons, tangible expressions of our flesh and blood, bread and wine existence.  

So when I speak, I bring along my box of props.  I hand out colored play-doh and stones for writing on with permanent ink, I press a packet of wildflower seeds into every hand that reaches and leave piles of sleeping flower bulbs as images of resurrection on Easter morning.  

In this way I practice what I’ve learned and remind myself as well, that the word indeed was Word among us, but it also came in flesh and when words fail to find entry through fallow ears, then maybe some bit of truth wrapped in the form of beauty may still break in through hands and eyes and hearts.  

 This post is a reflection on the topic of "Creating Beauty at Work."  Interested in reading more?  Check out Shelly Miller's post An Apologetic on Beauty @ Redemption's Beauty.

Or visit The High Calling website to visit other posts on the topic: Other High Calling Posts on Creating Beauty at Work.

Also linking with Playdates With God.