Bittersweet Farm

Yesterday I was moving some books and stumbled across an old journal. A thirty-year-old journal. Lois and I were married in September of 1979. The first journal entry was the first of October.

“My first entry in this journal will be by way of introduction. I have been married a week short of a month and I am working my way through college and supporting my family at VanCleve Elementary in Troy, Ohio.

A few days before my marriage I was reading some short writings of my dad’s that he wrote while in the Navy and studying at Norhtwestern University in Chicago, Illlinois. It is my hope that someday my son will be able to read my thoughts at twenty and I would be able to help him deal with life in a way that is honoring to Christ.”

I have had a photographer “on retainer” since September of 1979. Monday I had to drive to the Lower Huron Park to see the Redbuds while there were briefly in bloom. Lois took this beautiful picture for me. Thank you Lois

You don’t always have to understand things to enjoy them. Like Redbud trees.

Saturday night Lois and I spent a delightful evening having dinner with friends from the church. It was dusk as we made our way home. We took time to drive the winding way along the Huron River to drink in the fading light of a spring day. We had the whole park nearly to ourselves. For long stretches the road is lined with scores of Redbud trees and they putting on a display of stunning color just for us. There were places in the falling light that there were so many of them that there were banks of purple haze against the backdrop of the greening forest. [Read more…] about Why are Redbuds Purple?

D. A. Carson is going to be in town this weekend. He is a brilliant man who has written a bunch of very helpful academic things, but my favorite Don Carson book is a book about his father, who was a missionary pastor. In that book he tells an interesting story about some wise advice his mother gave him. Charlotte Mason would have called this book a living book. I mined out a little jewel of advice for you. After you make your way through Carson’s first Pauline-length sentence you will reach his mother’s pithy advice for those inevitable times when you feel unloved. It’s Mother’s Day week, so I thought it would be a good time to pass this along to you:

When I was in my mid-teens and going through a phase when I wanted to pull away from meetings both local and regional because (I pouted) those who attended didn’t have my interests, and they all care about themselves, and much more of the same, my mother, sitting quietly at her treadle sewing machine (for years she made most of our clothes), quietly quoted two or three proverbs, and then added, “He who would have friends must show himself friendly. At the next meeting, before you go into a sulk, look around for the loneliest person in the room, and go and find out everything you can about that person. Then find the next loneliest person, and do it again.” Inevitably I resented the advice, but I took her up on it and to my amazement was soon regarded as one of the region’s youth leaders.

-D. A. Carson, from Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor

C. J. Mahaney has some good things to say about the book, too.