The Exquisite Writing of Hal Borland

"Summer is misted dawns and searing afternoons, hot days, warm nights, thunderstorms cracking their writhing whips. Summer is shirt sleeves, sunburn, bathing suits, tall cold drinks, dazzling beaches and shimmering lakes. Summer is the green countryside, the cool fragrance of mountain pines.

Summer is the house wren bubbling over with morning song. It is the long afternoon aquiver with the sibilance of the cicada. It is slow dusk freckled with fireflies - and prickly with mosquitoes. Summer is a meadowful of daisies, a field of corn reaching for the sun, a straw hat, a hoe and a garden.

Summer is the fresh garden pea, new lettuce crisp in the salad bowl, snap beans, sun-ripe raspberries on the bush and chilled strawberries in a bowl of cream. Summer is the weed, the gnawing insect, the foraging woodchuck, the nibbling rabbit. Summer is sweat.

Summer is April and May grown into June and July, the green world working almost eighteen hours a day. It is a lazy river and a languishing brook. It is a vacation dreamed of, realized, too soon over and done, too soon a memory.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January."

~Excerpt from Sundial of the Seasons, by Hal Borland - I absolutely recommend it.

Generational Work

Today, I am so aware of the Gospel being a Generational Work. On many levels, I see this as clearly as the August sky.

"One generation shall praise His works to another, and declare His mighty deeds..."

Firstly, I see the need for young men in the church - men in their early to mid twenties - to mentor teenage men. Mine is not the only church, by far, experiencing the dearth of young men with the leadership skills, talents, compassion, and charisma necessary to make loving Jesus seem desireable to their younger counterparts.

Men in their twenties aren't being taught that the Gospel is a generational work. They don't feel responsible. They aren't being taught how to stick and stay and not run away. They aren't being challenged to see their church as an extension of their family, and to accept the mantle of responsibility to mentor the young guys in their home church. ("Home church? What's that?")

This is partly because the parents, those middle aged men and women, aren't taking responsibility either. They, too, float from church to church, easily offended, not sinking roots into the relational soil, weathering the seasons, reaping the harvest. ("Harvest" means so much more than seeing souls saved. Harvest is fruit matured to the picking-point, in any and every good and happy area of life!)

I remember a conversation the Preacher and I had, a couple years back, with an old salt of a saint who'd pastored churches, and does pastor even now. We were talking of those we've seen come and go in our churches, and how sad it was, this loss of potential and momentum and fruit, when roots are ripped up and transplanted, over and over, to no real avail. We were lamenting the limitation that comes when people of any age do not respect authority, nor do they value continuity of years in relationships.

He said, "I will tell you this: 100% of the drifters and the relationally challenged have issues with their own parents. You cannot devalue or disrespect that most basic relationship and expect to somehow understand how healthy relationships in the family of God function."

Ah, wisdom is justified by her children.

It cuts both ways, I have recently discovered. Parents have to model respect by respecting their grown children, honoring their unique destiny, and asking forgiveness when necessary. No parent, by virtue of their position, has the right to manipulate the lives of grown children, or tear down the choices, spouse, or profession of their son or daughter. If you try that, you will live with the consequences, and they are indeed bitter. Far better to humble yourself, even as The Parent, and sincerely make things right...on your child's terms, not yours.

Otherwise, they will forgive you. But they will reserve the right to forgive you from a distance. Is that really what you want?

Wisdom is proven in the generations. This is why I am so thrilled to see many three-generation-strong families in Harvest Church, my own being one of them. (We are actually four generations strong!) Serving God with my parents and my children, while holding my grandson is what the Gospel is about. I can say that, because I know what it has taken to get to this place....a whole lot of obedience and applying my theology to my biography.

And a whole, whole lot of forgivin'.

And we are SO not a trophy family. We've had to apply the Gospel in ways that have humbled us all into the dirt, laid bare and vulnerable before one another. If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you know. And it ain't over yet. This Gospel that the Preacher and I have joyfully and painfully lived out in the secret places of our home relationships, is a Generational Work.

You can't manufacture it. It isn't assembly-line. It is artisanal work, done by heart and hand. This sort of work isn't nurtured well in an impersonal, business model church environment, with all due respect.

Yes, one generation shall praise His works to another! I need to wrap this up. I hear my grandson waking up...I can hear him "declaring the Lord's mighty deeds"...well. He's declaring something...loudly.

"The Father forgave the prodigal before he confessed (Luke 15:20) and God provided my forgiveness before I asked, and isn’t this the Kingdom I’m orienting to, the compassion before the confession?

I am a daughter failed and I am a parent failing and I know it in ways now I never knew: if I rip apart the bridge of forgiveness for my own parents with my own hands, I destroy the only way my own children can come to me."

~from the beautiful blog "A Holy Experience" by Ann Voskamp

God Loves His Girls

Today, I enjoyed an early morning drive with The Preacher in his new truck.

Today, I was given a purse that cost half what he paid for his truck.

A. Purse.

Today, I enjoyed time with girlfriends, eating cupcakes and salad with strawberries.

Today, I spent some time with a friend who is a missionary to Cambodia.

Today, I'm having a hard time resolving what seems to be two different aspects of the same, good God. I serve a God who often asks me to do hard things - to live sacrificially. I serve a God who requires me to not just understand the gospel, not just espouse the gospel, not just preach the gospel, but also to "live of the gospel", meaning to apply it to my ordinary, real-world relationships. This is often a hard thing to do. Cheap, this life isn't. It has cost me in profound ways. The law would be a far easier thing to live by - and no, law and Good News are not synonymous, though the same God is Author of them both.

I serve a God who asks my friends to do hard things, like live in Cambodia. He also requires them to apply the gospel to their ordinary, real-world relationships, and on top of that, they worry about their child's exposure to rat dander...and spiders as big as your hand can and do bite them. I haven't come near to that, in my service to God. My friends are the real deal, and I am the faux deal. (And it is okay for me to believe that. I'm not having a crisis, I simply esteem my friends - in a very honest way - as being better than myself.)

And I serve a God who happens to know that I love me a pretty, well made purse. I mean, I reckon He knows, since there is nothing knowable that He doesn't know in absolute perfection of wisdom. So He puts it on someones heart to gift me with a handbag that cost more than half what The Preacher paid for his truck.

Oh, but wait. The Preacher was very nearly given his truck. His truck is worth easily four times what the price was (car lots would charge six or seven times what he paid)...which takes me back to resolving the side of God that often asks Tim and I to do hard things, with the side of Him that blesses His boys with trucks, and gives His girls Eric Javits purses. You see...herein lies the rub: sometimes The Preacher and I obey God to the exact detail, and sometimes we don't. And yet He turns and blesses us with unearned, undeserved extravagance that defies our logic.

This is my exact purse, down to the color. Google Eric Javits and Neiman Marcus. Warning: sit down and spit out your coffee before you check the price. And make sure your theology can handle the fact that God often asks His girls to do the Actually Hard Thing (versus the Imagined Hard Thing, or the Self Imposed Hard Thing)...and He loves His girls so much, He sometimes gives them extravagantly expensive, and lavishly pretty purses for no real reason.

These are not easy issues to resolve, trust me.

You have been forewarned.

What The Preacher is Up To

He was up at 5, and then by 7:30 this morning, this is what my camera saw:



He's detailing his new truck. He is putting the Barbie Jeep up for sale, as this deal is way, way too sweet for him to pass up. Our neighbor, because he loves Tim, is letting his truck go for less than a song.

More like half a song.

It's in great shape, one owner.

I have one happy preacher on my hands, because his new ride may not cost him a penny out-of-pocket.

He told me, months ago, "God is about to give me a truck. I need one. I've been asking Him for one."

I should listen to him more often.

Kitchen Riches From My Gardens

...kitchen windowsill...and the cherry tomatoes are not even in yet. When they are, I will be overrun. Hundreds, it seems, hang ripening.

...one of my gardens - this one has green peppers, tall beautiful basil, and (believe it or not) daylilies and gladioli, all jumbled together. And it looks amazing. I am totally into pottagers, with their mixture of vegetable, herb, flower and fencing, with pathways. I'm working my way into that. I really like this photo, with its tiny perspective.

This garden has tomatoes, pole beans, squash, cucumbers, cantaloupe and sunflowers!

Another part of the same garden spot. Please ignore the orange hammock, still hanging. It was a souvenir my daughter Sarah brought back from Cambodia a few years ago. It lost its place when our tree was taken out by the storms awhile back. It still hangs from its other anchor, with nothing to hook up to. I've been meaning to cut it down - it would take all of five minutes. Honestly, I pay no attention to it, and only notice it now, "screaming" at me in this picture.

Some of you just won't understand, but I've felt poignant today. Always, long about mid-August, I begin to notice a difference in the light. I know that sounds crazy - it is still "high summer". But I see it...the light is ever-so-subtle in its shifting and changing. It heralds a coming fall season.

And again, I am sad. I think of a line from an old Gladys Taber book, "Stay a little, summer, do not go..."

This anomaly started about two years ago. I just began, inexplicably, to love summer. I guess summer is the true "Season of Harvest"...it is when the harvest becomes real and exciting. You have to understand, I've always been an autumn girl, and always loathed summer. No more. Tho' the heat has been awful, we here have gotten enough rain.

I am sure if I lived in some of the drought stricken areas of Texas, Oklahoma, and other places, I would not feel the same way.

But I live in east Tennessee, and so...

"No one can believe God is not good when the August gardens are in their heyday." ~Gladys Taber, from the wonderful book "The Book of Stillmeadow"

An Idea for Your Spent Sunflowers

I always buy or cut (when I have my own plentiful supply) several bouquets of sunflowers for my girls' birthday, to decorate the house. Their birthday was a week ago today, and so the bouquets are spent...

So I tied some twine around them, and hung them on a tree in our back garden...

...to attract the goldfinches.

And it works!

...and looks so beautiful.

Try it. I think you'll love the look of it, and will love seeing the goldfinches in your garden.

Weak Is The New Strong

ingredients for bruschetta - one of summer's gifts of wealth...each ingredient, simple but powerfully healthy for you. I include it because anyone can grow the ingredients for little-t0-no cost, and yet the health benefits are pure riches...and I love it so much, I am making it fit in with the idea of this post...and because it is my blog. And because I am quite proud of my photography, here.

The Bible never said, "Let the strong say 'I am strong'. " That sounds like a simplistic, even silly statement. But it is a profound thought. The Word of God says, "Let the weak say 'I am strong'."

Oh yeah...and "Let the poor say, 'I am rich.' "



How boring is it, when the rich say, "I am rich"? So passe. So unoriginal. So unsurprising. So obnoxious, even, when the rich find ways to let you know it. All the rich are supposed to do - Biblically speaking - is to share their riches. And maintain a humble heart.



But when the poor declare "I AM RICH".....well "wooo-weee, shut my mouth and slap your grandmaw"...because the whole, wide, watching world gets to decide whether the poor man does indeed enjoy riches money can't buy, or whether he is crazy. (Sorry, lines from country music songs, completely unrelated to what I'm talking about, keep popping up in my head. Have compassion on me...after all, YOU could be in my head, instead of me.)


We underestimate ourselves and others when we base that estimate on unbiblical notions of what is weak and what is strong. Some of you have lost dear friends because of an inaccurate assessment regarding what God sees as weak and what He sees as strong. He will surprise you, if you ask His opinion on strength and weakness, and if you ask Him with a tender heart.

I will rather boast in my weaknesses, so that the strength of Christ can be well-seen in me.