Fresh Water

Behind my house is a small pond – at 30 feet deep or so, it's not tiny, but at the same time you wouldn't want to put anything bigger than a canoe or rowboat into it, either. Living near a pond with 4 small children is an adventure all its own – once you get past the (critical) safety instructions, there all all kinds of precious childhood joys to be had: swimming, building your own boat and seeing if it floats, leaping off the diving board leftover from days gone by, fishing, digging in the sand at the edge, observing the animal life of the pond (laughing at the heron!), ice skating in winter.

And I love the pond, desperately.

There's no better way to start a morning than curled up with a cup of hot coffee, watching the fog burn off the water and the whole back yard wake up. There's no better way to watch the latest meteor shower than curled up in warm blankets with my favorite 1^st grader, way past bedtime, lying flat on the sandy bank. There's no better way to spend a lazy summer afternoon trying to skip rocks across the surface and sharing in the joys of neighbor children laughing with my own.

But there's some mystery around the pond, too (actually, for a born-and-raised city kid like me, there are many mysteries about the pond, I'm learning!). But the chief mystery was this: The pond is not creek-fed at all, and yet it acts like it is – no pond scum on the surface, healthy fish life, clean water. For the longest time, I couldn't figure it out.

After asking some questions of the neighbors and poking around a little more, though, I found the answer to my question: The pond is fed, regularly and consistently, by an under-ground spring. It wasn't originally a “natural” pond at all, but a gravel bed, dug up as a side business, and abandoned when the diggers hit the unstoppable spring.

And over several days of coffee-gazing following that revelation, it hit me: I know some people who function just like my pond! Seemingly un-fed by “normal” sources, they continue to display fresh energy, patient love, unswerving faith that defies the laws of logic. People who come near them are refreshed, renewed, made better. What is their secret?

An underground Spring.

They are connected to their creator, the designer of Life, our eternal Source of energy and strength and courage and love. Healed from the inside out. Walking in joy that has nothing to do with life's current circumstances.

Peace that is visible, even when it's invisible.

How It's Made

My children love to watch a show called “How It's Made” - if you've never seen it, it's a mini-documentary series on . . . well, how things are made. Crayons, bottle caps, chocolate, you name it – pretty interesting stuff, even for grown-ups.

But of course the show makes it look easy and quick – step 1, 2, 3 – Voila! Perfectly-finished product. And while the terrifically-done editing makes for great television, we grown-ups know that there are parts to the story that aren't being shown. Broken machines, missed deadlines, occasional confusion, quarterly loss postings, general piles of miscellaneous dust.

And that's just it: manufacturing is often – well, dusty. How many times have I prayed that God would work in my spirit, change me, make something beautiful in my spirit? So why do I get so frustrated when that changing process is – well, dusty?

(Because life, unedited, is dusty, too.)

I don't like chaos, I don't like scrambling for Plan B (or C or D), I don't like uncertainty. But what if those are the by-products of God's true work? Am I willing to look beyond the chaos of several young children and see the reverse side of that as the gift of a happy childhood? I want their rooms to be clean, without my reminding them, and quick-like. But they persist in making elaborate, time-consuming, chaos-inducing origami zoo creatures as A Big Surprise for me. A gift of dearest devotion, when all I truly wanted was for them to clean that room. Am I willing to see the love behind the zoo creatures and look past the bomb-shell bedroom?

When I go to sleep praying for peace, and wake to heartache, might that be a part of God's work? When friends have stumbled in life's pain and needed a strengthening arm, my wish for words of comfort returned fruitless. But, slowly, I am learning the Teachers of those words, the empty nights that prove the reaches of God's love.

It is dusty.

I do not like the dust.

But, brokenly, I am grateful. I know the Editor, and – eventually - the show is going to be good.