All Right

We drive home from visiting the property we bought, where we’d been taking slow climbs over downed blackberry brambles and sweeping leafless maple twigs aside to map out where our house might fit. Tom had the 100 foot winding tape measure and a compass. He’d already figured out the corners of the potential house and it was our job—mine and two of the children— to follow directions and somehow get through the soft beds of downed pine and cedar branches to carefully place the worn orange cones in the proper places amongst the ferns.

Every now and then I paused to listen, and other than the snapping and cracking of our small group moving through the woods (we couldn’t sneak up on a bear if we tried), all I heard was the intermittent splats of rain on my slicker hood and the occasional creak of trees rubbing against one another. We finished ten minutes before sundown, and swaggered and swished our way back through the brush to the van, satisfied with the job done.

Back home I simmer chai on the stovetop and ponder everything. The land itself (is this property—in size and scope and location—what we still want?). The agonizing house plan decision (how can I build and achieve the small size we want for the extra large family we still have?). The uncertainty of economics and culture and community. My mind feels like it is swirling around within the frothing milk in my pot, round and round.

And then. And then the pandemic. Lockdowns. Upon lockdowns. Our own people storming the congressional building. The insistence of segregating every person into one identity or another while isolating them from their relations and businesses. Masks, vaccines, first amendment freedoms, the gymnastical knots of new demands on and definitions in the English language. The utter atmosphere of anger, fear, anxiety and helplessness that is Everywhere I Go.

I’m supposed to raise up a house and build a family in this environment?

Well…yes.

It’s one thing to intellectually understand that there is nothing new under the sun, and to know enough history to see clearly that every march towards “progress” at the consequence, isn’t. It’s quite another to continue to marry, bear children and plant gardens. Or make tea.

The children and I settle in to watch an episode of “Superbook” where the Israelites are freed from their oppressors and invited to trust the Lord for their every provision. We discuss how a trip that perhaps could have been made in less than two weeks ended up as a sad forty year plod. We talk about how the root sin of pride gave its evil fruit in Pharoah’s actions, but how that same root sin gave its fruit of grumbling in God’s people. Oh, Lord, I don’t want to grumble and plod!

It dawns on me, perhaps a tiny glimmer of flickering light. Invited to follow the Lord through this current day desert of faithfulness and truth, shall I be distressed about the paths He gives me to pass through it? Shall I turn my nose from His daily manna of Scripture, more eager to consume whatever the world chooses to feed my mind? Shall my love for Christ be so meager that I cannot continue in trust in this good and faithful Shepherd, who learned obedience through suffering (the likes of which I will never know), and to whom I owe my very life in every way? What, after all, is twelve days of troublesome travel when compared to an eternity of blessed rest and joy in every way?

I take the last sip from my mug and that is that. The world is mad, I think (or perhaps I simply remember), so I shall count it as so to be reckoned. I shall still build a physical house of sticks on this world’s sinking sands, but my greatest work is to love the Lord my God and to stand steadfast in the truth while I build a foundational home on the Rock. Already I can see His remnants across the landscape lighting their candles in the windows of their homes too, quietly working with their hands, minding their own business, baking bread, reading Dr. Seuss, folding laundry. I choose to light a candle, too. It’s going to be all right.