Patience

Wilderness: sandwiches and such

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 4 Comments

For this, my determined attempt at struggling back onto the blog challenge Wagon, I offer a few quotes on today’s subject:

“I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.” – Walt Disney

“In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.” – Charles Lindbergh

“It is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged.” – Bruce Babbitt

“Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.” – Henry David Thoreau

Once you get over thinking, “Wow!  If Walt could only see Disney World these days,” you can begin to appreciate the wide applications of the idea of wilderness, both literally and metaphorically.

One of my personal favorites is the wilderness of the biblical exodus.  Well over 20 years ago, the pastor at my church at the time was preaching through the book of Exodus, and I remember him commenting how God could have easily chosen to shorten the days of Israel’s wanderings.  But there was purpose in those 40 years.  His admonition for our little flock was to remember that God could do the same for us.  In whatever wilderness we might currently have been wandering, he assured us that it was completely within God’s power to remove us from it instantly.  If He didn’t, we could be confident that there was a reason why we were still there.

I’ve thought of that lesson many times over the years as I’ve either strayed into a wilderness by my own neglect or a providential plunging which can only be ascribed to God’s good purposes.  Often in such wanderings my eyes are either darting around so furiously in panic, or fixed so determinedly on my outward bound path, that I am oblivious to intersecting the wilderness routes of others.  Sometimes I get frustrated with my fellow pilgrims because I assume they’re just being foolish and annoying as they zip along their merry highway, when it is likely they may be panicked or determined, too.  I think most of us are usually in some kind of wilderness at least part of the time.  I need to be more thoughtful and compassionate.

John the Baptist was a man of the wilderness.  He ate locust and honey.  When I was growing up and my family went on outdoor excursions, we ate Wilderness Sandwiches.  They weren’t crunchy with locusts, but they were sweet like honey – and filled with carbs and protein for energy.   To make Wilderness Sandwiches, you must either start with a pancake dinner or a pancake breakfast and intentionally make extra pancakes to use in the sandwiches.   You take the pancakes, spread a thin layer of brown sugar on each, place a piece of crisp bacon in the center, and roll it up.  I guess today, we’d call these Wilderness Wraps, but back then wraps were what we used to keep us warm on the trail.  No matter what you call them, they’re good for sustaining you through a day of wandering in the wilderness – the real OR the metaphorical.

You can’t go home

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 15 Comments

It’s always a sad day to have to disagree with Jon Bon Jovi and agree with your mother-in-law, but here I am.  When Bon Jovi asks with rock-n- roll bravado, “Who says you can’t go home?” who wants to disagree?  Not me.  And yet, when my daughter was preparing to make the drive home after her first semester of college, and her grandmother told her that going home wouldn’t be the same, I knew her MeMa was right.  My daughter didn’t want to believe it, she confessed to me, but before she knew it, she was experiencing all the angst that comes with wondering how things will be when you get home.  Will your friends treat you the same?  Will your parents and your siblings be the same?  Will all those familiar places calm the unsettled yearnings of your heart?  She learned that you really can’t go home – at least not the same person you were before.

As she was making that long drive home, across three state lines and past an obscene number of Subway restaurants, my daughter was anticipating a joyous reunion with family and friends, still clinging to the hope that her grandma didn’t know what she was talking about.  She wasn’t thinking about the fact that she has spent the last six months living with new people, working with new people, studying with new people, worshipping with new people, buying tampons and Top Ramen and Chai tea lattes from new people.  Those seemingly mundane activities can’t help but change a girl.  She has a whole new set of experiences that don’t include those of us back home.  She’s in that terribly frightening but awesomely exciting place in her life where she’s holding onto the fragile threads of change, trusting that they’ll weave her into a life that is every bit as durable as the piece of cloth from which she is being unraveled.  From one tapestry to another, this is the way the Weaver of our lives works.  He does not allow us to hang perpetually on museum walls, but rather proves Himself to be the artisan of living, breathing fabric that surpasses the finest breathable cotton cultivated on this planet.

Of course, my daughter did experience the reassurance of the love of family and friends this trip, and I am confident that someday she will be able to come home without angst and reservation.  Bon Jovi’s words will ring true, and my mother-in-law will be…well, a little less right.  There will be more strands of my daughter woven into a lovely new tapestry than will remain in the old, and she will be beginning to feel secure with the new thing of beauty that she will be.  Even if the Master Weaver does allow times in her life when the dust mites of reality nibble on her front side and the cold walls of perseverance chill her backside, she will know that “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.”

The Secret of Dirt

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 3 Comments

I have not been a barren woman. I have been blessed with more chairs around my kitchen table than I ever imagined. My womb has known the twinges and tugs of life grasping and straining existence from my own. Yet it is the image of barrenness that clutches at my viscera today.

School has resumed and with it my commute. I transport my seedlings. Twenty-two minutes we drive, past an air force base and a salt mine, but mostly past fields. I relish this time. I am reminded of my rural roots – the wheat, corn and alfalfa fields that yielded up life for me, my family, the neighbors down the road. The acres I drive past today grow flowers, shrubs and plants I can’t even identify – a reminder that at times I, too, have been a seed carried by seasonal breezes.
I am fascinated by the fields in their various stages of growth: some newly sprouted, some ready to be harvested, and stages in between. But it is not the perfect rows of blooming flowers or the determined little sprouts that capture my attention as I drive today. It is the fallow fields, the barren, the ones that have known the slicing blades of the plow. They are brown and empty – or stubbly with the yellowed, dried remains of a crop they birthed in another season. They are not attractive like the verdant and flowering. They are exposed; their frail top layers heedlessly frolic with the fickle wind. Worst of all, they don’t appear to be fruitful. Aren’t appearances “everything?” Do these that are bare yearn to be visibly pregnant with life? Do they long to exemplify the produce of their fertility?
No, I am the one who is uncomfortable with the fallow season. I have been spoiled; I don’t like looking unfruitful, unnecessary. I haven’t learned the secret of dirt: to know to be content with the beauty of emptiness, with the necessity of invisible replenishing, with the purposeful cuts of the plow.