Why We Should Bury Our Hopes

"Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness."

Psalm 37:3

That phrase, "cultivate faithfulness," also means "feed on God's faithfulness" or "feed securely."

I ruminate on this idea, that God's faithfulness to me is something that's supposed to nourish and feed my soul. It's a food/farming metaphor, but David the poet loves metaphors, so I'm on safe ground. 

God's faithfulness to me is like soil, good garden soil. It's solid and you can stand on it, but it's also loamy and you can dig into it, examine it, and bury seeds into it. Like physical soil God's faithfulness is life-giving, so seeds that are buried into it will germinate, grow, flourish, and eventually feed me.

What kind of seed do I bury into God's faithfulness? What do I take of my own, and I give it to God, and I say, "Here, God, please do something with this. Make it grow."

I think the seeds are our hopes. We can't make them grow and feed us, but God can. On our knees we scoop up a handful of God's faithfulness to us, and we examine it. How do we know He is faithful? We think about our lives, the decades behind us, and remember how He has brought us out of many troubles, how He has guided us to make good decisions, how He has redeemed and transformed our bad decisions, how He has loved us anyway. That faithfulness is the soil to which we now take our tiny, last, precious seed of itty-bitty hope, and into which we bury that seed. Our last hope.

Then what? We wait. Seeds don't sprout immediately. Hopes don't mature today. But God is faithful, and His soil always brings life, and in time the hope will pop through into the daylight and grow and become beautiful.

But that's not the goal -- the goal, as Ps. 37:3 says, is to nourish and feed us. God's faithful soil isn't lawn grass, it's vegetables! It will enrich our souls and satisfy our spirits and make us trust Him more for the next round of troubles that will come.

Bury your hopes. Give them up. Hand them to God and He will hand them back to you -- better, bigger, satisfying, mature. As the very next verse says, "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." If we delight in Him, of course, He is our desire. 

Many, many thanks to the dear friend who shared this psalm again with me this week. It has been a blessing over and over.

Oriental Watermelon Cutting

Every year Mrs. Faye Bond treats the entire town to a watermelon cutting. Free, fresh, local watermelon in her yard. Can you beat that? That's community and building friendship with neighbors. Here's Miss Faye with her family helpers:

She's 90-something.
Julia and Anna enjoyed a slice each. You can have as much as you like.

Dozens and dozens of folks come on bikes, golf carts, legs, or maybe a car.

Bo-Beau came! Julia sneaked him nibbles of watermelon.

We saw our friend Lily, the Great Dane.

The weather cooperated admirably.

I'm not really a watermelon eater, but Adam (who ate for both of us) said it was delicious.

Then we rode our bikes to Lou Mac Park and watched the flat-bottom clouds and the tilted sailboats.

I told Adam we should stop by The Bean and get some ice cream, to extend the date. Adam is all about extending the date. He rode home really fast on his bike to retrieve his wallet and met me at the Methodist Church, from which we rode to The Bean, which was empty of clientele.

Everybody was at the watermelon cutting, of course. We ate our massive scoops of ice cream in peace and enjoyed the view of town dock.

Whittaker Dock Redo

In spite of the blistering heat this summer, I have occasionally been on my bike. Sometime in the past week Adam and I made it out to Whittaker Creek Marina and walked the east dock. Happily, the dockmaster is replacing the entire dock, maybe 100 yards worth of wood planks. This is the view one way:

And the other way. He still needs to trim the planks' edges even.

To assist with the work, he has a long floating barge in the marina cut, next to the dock, loaded with a back hoe with a pile driver attachment on it. See the long pilings lying on the barge?

Here are two pilings. The bottom one is the new one. The top one is the extracted, old one. See the water line?

The new piling is much longer than the old one

Here's the spot where the work was at the moment. The wood weathers grey and brown.

The lines lying on the docks are grey and weathered too.

At the spot where the old dock wood meets the new, a plank lies across for boat owners to step over. Many boats had to be moved to alternate slips to make way for the barge and the piling extraction.

Maintaining a dock is no easy job! And our brackish water is rather tough on everything.
Even the boat boxes where people store things had to be moved out of the way.

These short dock extensions are being removed and redone as well.

Boats were moved from this water. The big blue library boat (okay, it's a library in my imagination!) used to float here. Remember it?

What a mess! The narrow slice of water where the barge sits is between the land and the dock, which runs parallel to the land. So the barge serves the purpose of passing the old pilings across to the land. See them stacked in the background? That way, the dockmaster doesn't have to haul those pilings down the dock, around the corner, and by the club house.

The barge is pushed around by a cute little tug boat of sorts. This is a casual operation, but it's still not cheap. We were told that each piling costs $750 to replace. That's quite a cost. The slip owners have bought their slips, and they pay an association fee too. Many slip owners rent out their slips to others if their own boats are not there.

There you have it. Today's temps and humidity are so very lovey -- what a relief! We will go biking in town, and next time we're out at Whittaker I'll try to remember to take photos and give an update on the new dock.

Catching Up

I'm sorry to say that I'm still struggling with my photo situation here on ye olde blogge. Hmm. Google Photos does a lovely job of syncing all my photos immediately onto their website. It even lifts them straight from my phone without my doing anything at all. However ... for some reason there is NO quick, easy, intuitive process to upload photos from that website to this blog. And both things are Google's. Why? Bleh.
Yesterday Oriental hosted yet another sailing event, the Hoop Pole Regatta, a kids' sailing race on sunfishes and FJs. A girl in our church participated in this race and placed 10th.

 I shot these photos from the end of the Lou Mac pier.

 Many of the races on the Neuse look like wandering chaos, to be honest. And if you're in them, they sometimes feel like long, languid, wandering chaos! But these kids had guide boats and the course was pretty tight. So they looks like little sails doing an intricate dance on the river dance floor. Waltzing boats -- there's an idea! It was lovely to watch.

 And here, my friends, is the REAL Farley, whose picture I snapped at the farmers' market yesterday. He's a character in my latest Dog Days of Oriental story, "Muffin Comes to Town."

 Hiya, Farley!
I finished a green shawl for the local Prayer Shawl ministry this week. I got down to the final two stitches (as you see on the needle), and I had less than two inches of yarn left. Knitters, has this ever happened to you? I had to start an entire new skein of yarn, for those two stitches. That's ridiculous!

 Peter returned to college this past week too. I hugged him quite a few times and felt rather teary. He does so well at school and was excited to go back, but I loved having him here this summer. He had a great time, made lots of great friends, had fun and worked hard. He'll miss these two pups, and they'll miss him. They slept with him at night, all snuggled up together on the futon.

 And he's off!

Come home soon!

Well, I did get these photos to load fine. I uploaded them from "my phone" directly, instead of trying any other uploading method. That's great ... except it means I will never be able to edit a photo, because I can't edit it on my phone -- cropping or anything else. Grr. I can do that on Google Photos, but then I have no clue how to get the photos to the blog. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I had a bugbear of a time getting photos to load into Trip Advisor, to do a few reviews. If you have ideas about how to use Google Photo for blogger, please do tell!

Daily Life

In spite of what our world and even our hearts tell us, God tells us repeatedly that we're to live today. Don't waste time rehearsing the sorrows of yesterday. Don't wallow in the glories or the regrets of youth. And don't wear yourself thin with anxiety about the future. Live -- and trust -- just for today.

Jesus said, "Therefore, do not be anxious for tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Matt. 6:34

The Lord told Moses, "I will rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day .... Gather of it every man as much as he should eat ...." He who had gathered much had no excess, and he who had gathered little had no lack. Moses told them, "Let no man leave any of it until morning." But they did not listen to Moses, and some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul. Ex. 16

Jesus said, "Give us today our daily bread." Matt. 6:11

Jesus told a parable: The land of a certain rich man was very productive. And he began reasoning to himself, saying, "What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?" And he said, "This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.'" But God said to him, "You fool! This very night your soul is required of you." Luke 12:16-20

Our greatest saints, heroes, and martyrs lived one day at a time. How could they have faced the hard roads God took them down, if they'd lived any other way? It is crushing to the spirit to contemplate the possible sorrows of tomorrow. As Elisabeth Elliot told us, "Do the next thing." Don't try to fix yesterday or insure against tomorrow. Great peace is found in only doing the few things that today requires.

I'm preaching to myself, I hope you know.

Zipporah, Moses's Wife

I married an Egyptian,
a runaway, a rebel,
not this circumcising Hebrew.

I'm a daughter of Abraham
but I refused to let him
cut this second child until

He and his God forced me -- me --
to do it to the baby.
We were in such a rage,

I threw the flesh at his feet
as Eliezer screamed.
He threw me out, back to Midian.

I never saw Egypt. My father --
they're two peas in a pod! --
Made me go back to him.

I wandered that wilderness
the rest of my life, and died there.
What a misery!


August 5, 2015
copyrighted by the author

Resetting the Brain

Sometimes life becomes so emotionally and psychologically overwhelming you get in a rut. You slog your way through a painful daily routine, wincing as life stings you, hunkering down for the next blow. You pull your curtains, hide in your house, and plague yourself with what Adam calls "the three-thought cycle." Your brain spins in a relentless, damaging playback of whatever sadness is in your life.
At that point, you need a friend to yank you out of it, drag your from your dark couch, and help you reset your brain.
I dragged Adam from the house yesterday like a good wife friend. I didn't know where we were going. I only knew we would get on the ferry. That would put a wide river between us and home. We had no plans for the rest of the day. I mentioned ice cream.

But after the ferry I turned left instead, and we ended up in Beaufort. And we ate Mexican because Adam hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch, and he was hungry.

It was mediocre Mexican, but it was a start. 

Sometimes it's more important to make a start than to make it perfect.

Then we walked along the boardwalk and looked at boats. 

When you like boats, they tend to take your mind off other things.

This, my friends, is a serious boom tent. Rather like a Conestoga wagon on water.

And because it was there, and free, and air conditioned (!!), we strolled through the Maritime Museum. This is one of the finest free museums around. The exhibits are great!!

And they've recently opened a reading room, beautifully, tastefully decorated. Quiet. If I lived near Beaufort I'd come each week. You cannot take books out of the room, but you can sit in their leather sofas and read to your heart's content.

I foresee future dates with Adam here, each of us happily scouring boating adventures.

And look what they have!! A real live working card catalog!! Yay!

It's ridiculous, I know, but that wooden box made me very happy.

We walked town a little.

Here's an alley. Beaufort is small and lovely.

Usually our dates are discussions about logistics. When shall we leave? Where shall we eat? Are there any decent movies? Find directions. The questions require online searching, checking of hours. How much money do we want to spend? I believe I wear Adam out with the logistics.

This weekend, neither of us had mental energy to tolerate convoluted plans.

He said, "I would walk the beach at Fort Macon." So to Fort Macon we went.

We parked on the far left and walked north away from the crowds, toward the fort.

I think he was already feeling a little better. I was steadily administering that friendly medicine of care, helping him push his "reset" button :)

Adam is a rock-skipper. At the beach it's tricky, finding shells that skip well.
We saw turtle protection areas frequently.

I took photos. He skipped shells.

 The evening sun shone on our backs, and the surf thundered.

We walked past the last humans until my feet wearied and I asked to turn back. I hate turning back. I want to walk on and on. Adam crossed the sand to the high dunes to see the fort. If you click on the photo below, you can see the fort's pole and flag.

I collected some shells but didn't keep them. I'll just keep them here.

This walk was long and luxurious. How glad I am that we went!

Marriage is wonderful for many reasons, but one certainly is that when one partner is low or suffering, the other can notice, take action, and gently nurture the loved one back to a healthier state. I'm thankful to be in a marriage like that. Adam has done this for me many times. It's an important way of saying, "I love you."