Bittersweet Farm

Good Morning from out on Bittersweet Farm;

Last spring Lois and I were invited to Pine Cone Cottage on Swains lake, the cozy home of Ken and Gigi Wyatt. Ken is a retired newspaperman who is one of our elders at Bethel Church. When we arrived I smiled to see Gigi had prepared shepherds pie for the occasion. We talked for a few hours, but it seemed a few minutes.

Their table overlooks the lake. We finished eating and leaned back and talked of common interests. Soon Ken and I discovered that we had both read and loved Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy. I had read and re-read the book for years. Vanauken would often carry on correspondence with people using postcards with small print. Ken got up and walked over to his shelf and pulled the book down. In it was a small postcard from VanAuken written in 1978, a personal note, hand written by Vanauken.

This morning Ken sent me a picture of his original copy of the book and the postcard from Sheldon Vanauken.

A significant part of the book is a love story between Vanauken (Van) and Jean Davis (Davy). Together they study at Oxford and it is there they find Christ. Van corresponds and later regularly meets with C. S. Lewis. It makes fascinating reading.

In his youth Vanauken turned away from Christianity, but as a young naval officer standing on the bridge of a ship in the Pacific one night contemplating the path of moonlight on the ocean and later, walking at evening and hearing the bells of Oxford, he feels a tug on his heart to reconsider.

“I suspected that all the yearnings for I knew not what that I had ever felt—when autumn leaves were burning in the twilight, when wild geese flew crying overhead, when I looked up at bare branches against the stars, when spring arrived on an April morning—were in truth yearnings for him. For God. I yearned towards him.”

Vanauken begins to read Lewis and others and he is surrounded by bright, magnetic, Christian friends. I love how he describes this in A Severe Mercy:

“These were our first friends, close friends. More to the point, perhaps all five were keen, deeply committed Christians. But we liked them so much that we forgave them for it. We begin, hardly knowing we were doing it, to revise our opinions, not of Christianity but of Christians. Our fundamental assumption, which we had been pleased to regard as an intelligent insight, had been that Christians were necessarily stuffy, hidebound, or stupid—people to keep one’s distance from. We had kept our distance so successfully, indeed, that we didn’t know anything about Christians. Now that assumption had soundlessly collapsed. The sheer quality of the Christians we met at Oxford shattered our stereotype, and thenceforward a reference in a book or conversation to someone’s being a Christian called up an entirely new image. Moreover the astonishing fact sank home our own contemporaries could be at once highly intelligent civilized witty fun to be with and Christian.”

I like to think of Bethel Church as such a people and as such a place. I like to think that when people encounter Bethel it is a challenge to their stereotypes of Christians. I like to think that when people come to Bethel, when they encounter Bethel people out in their places of living and business and work, they find people who are genuine in following Jesus. Imagine a people like that. Imagine a place like that.

Ken Pierpont
April 29, 2019

Here is my talk Sunday at Bethel Church, the first message in the Jesus People Series:

Easter. It’s dusk on Easter Day out on Bittersweet Farm. All the family have gone home and the house is quiet leaving us to our thoughts, and they are sweet tonight. Friday at Bethel the church was full of worshippers even with some in the balcony. Today the place was full to the ceiling, even the balcony was well-populated. We celebrated with food, brass, bells, songs, choir, dance (on Friday night), prayers, praise, accordion, and the preaching of the Word. The Bethel faithful invited hundreds of guests. I’m sure it is a day I will remember for the rest of my life. We are so blessed to serve here.

Finding Bittersweet.Every day I’m getting reports from people who are reading Finding Bittersweet. My heart is full for how it is being used to encourage people. When I was writing the book I knew it would be of interest to our friends, but I was not sure how it would be received by those who do not know us well. The testimonies that are coming back are from some who are going through deep waters and the Finding Bittersweet story is helping them cling to the promises of God.

A Story Behind the Writing of the Finding Bittersweet Story

This evening I am in my writing corner and the sun has set on Easter and I’m tired. I’m tired in a peaceful way. I’m about to climb up into our wonderful bed and rest. Tonight I will rest with a smile in my heart. I have a beautiful copy of my new book Finding Bittersweet lying on my desk under the light beside me. I keep looking over at it with satisfaction. I pick it up and fan through it. I re-read snatches of it. It makes me smile. It makes me want to cry. I give thanks to God.

To the author a book like Finding Bittersweet is an accomplishment, it is a treasure, it is the culmination of decades of living and reading and writing and crafting words and conversations and stories and listening. There are are stories and stories behind stories revealed in the book and there are stores behind the stories of the book that will probably never be printed.

So the book is really the product of primary grade teachers drilling basic facts into a hyper little blonde boy. It’s the product of bus rides and reading groups and book clubs and trips to the Principal’s office. It’s the product of my parents faithful discipleship and discipline, their love and encouragement. There are dead-ends and there are misunderstandings. There are false starts and scraps of ideas that never came to anything. There were hurts and injustices. There were my own many sins and mistakes.

When I wrote the heart of the book it was in the deep winter. We had a snow day and it was imprudent to try to get the church office open. We stayed home and enjoyed the luxury of a snow day with the calendar page wiped clean. I wrote that day. All day. Coffee and writing. Little else. Sitting by the window in the dead of winter writing about spring drives through the mountains it seemed at times if I opened the window the air would bear the fragrance of spring.

My faithful little Jeep sat out in the yard as if shivering in the snow and icy wind. The furnace purred. I napped, rose refreshed, brewed more coffee, wrapped myself is a fleece-lined flannel shirt jacket and kept writing. I wrote on into the night and that day the heart of the book was done.

There would be many, many, more hours of writing, editing, re-writing, listening to others, but I was well on my way after that winter day.

A now spring has come and the book is on the desk beside me and a season of my life has ended, but the lessons are sealed in this book. Now I look forward to new and fresh stories. There will always be more stories. Life pulses with them.

Ken Pierpont
Bittersweet Farm
Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019

Below I have gathered some photos of many of the family today.

Our son Pastor Kyle, his wife Elizabeth and the boys.

Kyle, Oliver, and Leland

Our oldest daughter Holly, her husband Jesse with Aiden Redemption and Bella Allene

Our son Pastor Chuk, his wife CC and children Aspen and Gunnison

Our Daughter Heidi

Our daughter Hannah and her husband Dale

Our son Deputy Dan Pierpont, his wife Katelynn and their son Waylon (another on the way)

Wes and Dylan

Our newest granddaughter, Halie Marie Pierpont, born to our son Wes and his wife Dylan.

Hope America and her friend Tim

And this is Lois, who avoids pictures a lot but needed to be on this page… without whom, no one would be here.