Things That Influence for Good.
I had a conversation today with a friend who is a devout and mature believer. He mentioned some things that contributed to his spiritual formation. He said, “When my dad was alive we would go to a Bible Conference every summer at Gull Lake, or Winona Lake, or Maranatha. He would pick the week that featured HCJB radio is the missionary of the week or a teacher/preacher from Moody Bible Institute.”
Now his father and mother and with the Lord, but my friend graduated from Moody Bible Institute, he met and married a woman he met there, and he is the director of a Christian camp. If you are a wise parent you will do what you can to influence your children toward things that are good and worthy, wise and noble.
Learning Together Naturally
On a warm spring night a man was driving at night through the countryside with his daughter. It was late, past her bedtime. He made conversation with her as they drove through the darkness. To make conversation he said, “Honey, if we could go to the library and get a book on any subject at all, what kind of book would you get?”
She said, “I would get a book about the stars in the sky, why they sparkle and how they move.”
“That is called astronomy,” he said.
Ahead he found a place to pull off the country road and he and his daughter lay on the hood of the car and looked into the clear night sky. He answered her questions and told her everything he knew about stars and planets and the solar system. It was a sweet learning moment and it bonded their hearts together in love for each other and creation and it didn’t seem at all like a school assignment.
We homeschooled our eight children but you don’t have to homeschool to learn together at home. Early in scripture God instructed his people to saturate their home and daily affairs with learning moments. God instructed his people through Moses to draw a strait line from the things they observed in the world around them to their Creator and his love for them and their duty to love him back.
We don’t have any little people around Bittersweet Farm except when one of the almost 20 grandchildren comes to visit. When we do we try to pay attention to things and let learning and worship tangle together. Truth kinda’ slips up on you that way and it’s hard to shake.
We cherish memories of moon walks in the country and starry winter nights from long ago, of watching moonlight on the surface a quiet lake together, of walking paths under pines beside the rushy lakeshore hand-in-hand with little children who now are grown with children of their own.
And still we are learning of God and of his world as long as we are alive.
I’ve said it before. Bittersweet Farm is a real farm. It is not a working farm, but it is a gentleman’s farm, and for that reason it is a farm. I’m writing this in my darkened corner. Lois is sleeping in the same room. She works tomorrow. We are in the last hour of a quiet Monday. I didn’t start my car all day… until Lois got home from work and we drove to town for a meal.
We are in wintertime, but it has been mild. Saturday, Sunday, and today the sun shone on Bittersweet. The little house is built so the front rooms and the living part of the house face the east and south and drink in sunlight. The north and west sides of the house have fewer windows, the better to weather the west winds in winter.
When the sun rises the large kitchen windows capture it’s yellow-golden warmth like warming your hands at the fire. The dining room has two large east-facing windows that do the same. Along the front of the house that faces south are six large windows and a door that allow the sunlight in as it traces across the southern sky in winter. Across the road is a woods draped up over a hill, but in the winter it is bare and the sun filters through to the house. In the summer the leaves offer shade. I like to think the people who designed the house thought of all those things when they planned it.
When Charles Perlos had the house remodeled the house he went to great expense and effort to use modern triple-pain windows that were the same size as the original ones. Where siding was replaced, it was replaced with the same cedar as the original house. So the house is simple, but it we build thoughtfully and no one who has ever lived here for its twelve decades has appreciated it more than the ones who have owned it for the last five years.
We had all the flooring taken out upstairs and down except the bathroom and replaced it with light hickory hardwood that glows in the sun and shines warm in the evening with the reflection of indirect lighting. It is small and it is simple, but it is ours and it was a provision of God and the fruit of diligent work. We never start or end a day, never climb the stairs or eat a meal or see the little house from down the road approaching through the arch of trees, that we don’t breathe a prayer of sincere thanks to God for it.
It’s a one-hundred and twenty-three year old farm house. It’s a place on the earth where a weary man can rest and listen for God’s voice in the turning seasons. It is a place of simple and quiet. It is a more-managable little plot and a couple buildings that a simple man of words can manage with the help of God and his friends, and most of all his life-partner, Lois.
We could grow vegetables. Maybe we should. We could grow pumpkins or fruit trees. We could grow wildflowers and herbs, but crafting words is a better and more fruitful and productive use of my time, so I tend the place and feed the birds and enjoy its quiet and peace and I don’t have be enslaved to it that way. It’s a joy to us. We tend a few flowers. We mow and weed and trim and arrange things to be orderly and to give us joy and then we sit on the porch and walk among the flowers. We listen to the birds and watch the fireflies. We hear the peepers in the spring and the cracking of the trees in winter. Our hearts always leap when we hear the Barred Owl or the Coyotes. The call of cranes and geese overheard call my heart to worship like chapel bells ringing on the Lord’s Day.
Bittersweet Farm
February 22, 2023
