The story of the Prodigal Son has been on my mind this week, but it’s not prodigal himself or his brother, or even the father that’s captured by thoughts.  Nope, I’ve been thinking the bout the Prodigal’s mom.  Sure, I know she doesn’t actually come up in the story Jesus tells, but I’m guessing she’s there.

When Jesus tells the story in Luke 15 He says, “There was a man who had two sons.  The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.” Now you and I know it wasn’t that simple. The older son probably stood in the kitchen, listening and shaking his head while the father and younger son partook in a fair amount yelling and door slamming.  And Mom? Well, she’s there. At one point the young son appeals to her, looking for her approval and wanting her to side with him.  The mother now has a terrible choice: my child or what’s Right. Tearfully she tells her dear offspring the truth he doesn’t want to hear and stands firm on her convictions. The younger son is so incensed he packs his bags, he takes the check for half of his inheritance, and slams the door one more time.  He purposely disappears, cancelling his membership in the family.  “I’ll show them,” he thinks as he blocks them from his phone and social media.

Obviously, life continued for every member of the family.  We are told the Prodigal left the country to live the wild life he wanted.  Dad and the remaining son absorb the loss of half the company’s capital and a third of their work force. They work hard to rebuild. And mom? I think we can assume that she, too, continues on. I’m sure that, even as she finds fulfillment and joy in her days, there is an unfilled and raw hole in her heart where her beloved child remains.

Jesus doesn’t tell us how long the Prodigal was gone.  Perhaps it was just a few months, maybe just a year or two.  Maybe it was much longer. We don’t know, but we do know that when he did ‘come to his senses’ and made the journey home, he didn’t have to ring the doorbell.  No – in Jesus’ telling, it was the father who spotted the son when he was ‘still a long way off’. How amazing for the son, despite the burned bridges and slammed doors. His father loved and missed him so much that he was staring down the road looking for his missing son (probably a habit that began on the day the Prodigal left).  Now comes the part that concerns me. Since Mom wasn’t in Jesus’ story to begin with, we have no way of knowing how the story ends for her. I hope that she is right there beside her husband, dancing joyfully at the reconciliation that brought her precious child home.  That’s the ending I cling to, any other is just too sad to contemplate.

There’s this one picture of my dad. He’s not a handsome man. His ears are too big, his nose is bulbous. He’s got age spots. But. The set of his mouth leaves no doubt he’s just made a ‘smart aleck’ remark, and I can hear echoes of the guffaw that no doubt ensued. (No one ever enjoyed a joke he told more than he himself.)  I love this picture, and I love more than anything else the deep wrinkles at his eyes.  They tell the story of years of hard work and also of ready laughter.

I look at that face and I know beauty. 

Funny, though.  Because when I look in the mirror at my face and I see similar spots and wrinkles, I only see age and imperfection.  Hmmm.  His face is wonderful and tells his story, mine just looks old.  It’s easy I suppose, in light of our culture’s influence, to understand this conundrum, but today I’d like to reject my disapproval of my own visage and celebrate the gift of being alive.  Too often I get mired in the messiness of living and stop cherishing life itself.  Perhaps we all do until that frozen moment when there’s a screech of tires, an unexpected late night phone call, a lump, a fever, or any other of those hard events between one blink and the next that bring us face to face with mortality.

So, today, I’m celebrating being alive. I’m actively searching for reasons to rejoice. There are a few leaves on the tree next door that have morphed from summer green to fall yellow. There’s a new feel in the air, and while I don’t exactly like the idea of winter’s approach, the crispness infuses me with the excitement of change.  My cat, who I just bathed yesterday (not a pretty moment for sure with us both growling and wet by the time we’re finished) is now so soft and warm as she holds court from the back of the couch.  Yes, life is hard and scruffy but there are so many moments of sheer exquisiteness and majesty in every single simple sound or feel.

So, I stand for a bit in front of the mirror.  Yup, there they are, the age spots and wrinkles, the imperfections. They are the total of where I’ve been and all I’ve done. They echo all my laughter and fears, hopes realized and abandoned, successes and failures.  And, yes, they are beautiful.

In my devotions this morning I was reading the story of David and Goliath.  I noticed something, something actually obvious but that I hadn’t paid attention to.  Start with Goliath himself: he’s glorious – tall, broad shouldered wearing a bronze helmet and armor.  He probably has millions of followers on Instagram – he’s a real influencer. He exudes confidence and has a big mouth.  He is clearly used to getting his way as a result of his status and size.  And he thinks he’s fighting “the servants of Saul.” (I Samuel 17:8)  Now check out the Israelite soldiers, which includes David’s brothers: they cower each morning when Goliath shows up with his bullying rant and they “fled from him in great fear.” ( v 24)  Sure, they post about their own exploits and have a decent following on social media, but they’ve also read the polls that claim they can’t win and the pundits that tell them religion is old fashioned, so they also believe they are merely “servants of Saul.” They are focused on the enemy and fixated on nothing besides how King Saul will reward the man who vanquishes Goliath.

There’s the aha for me: the seasoned soldiers and Goliath all believe the same thing (and because they believe it, they are correct). What is that belief? Well, that the Israelites are merely servants of Saul and that they are beatable. David walks into the camp and is confused. He’s not got a signal when he’s out with the sheep and he’s not been awakened to the new belief about who he serves. He doesn’t understand why all these men are frightened when the God of All is on their side. He’s perplexed that his mighty and respected brothers are quaking in their boots.  David doesn’t hesitate. He goes to Saul and volunteers.  After Saul stops laughing, he tells David, “You are just a boy.” (v 33) David tells the king the Truth that the king and others have forgotten (and I’m paraphrasing verses 36 and 37 here), “This Philistine has defied the armies of the living God and he will fall just like the bear and the lion I’ve killed. The Lord who rescued me from them will rescue me from Goliath.”

There were thousands of soldiers showing up every day for 40 days to listen to Goliath’s taunt, and somehow, each one of them bought the story the media was playing and forgot who they served.  David, and David alone, remembered.  He recalled how faithful and loving God had treated him in the past and he knew, he KNEW that God would be victorious again.  So, he picked up his stones and his sling, he shucked off the unnecessary and ill-fitting armor recommended to him, and he went out in faith to defeat the enemy.   I love David.

Many times I have hare-brained ideas, I follow through, and they just don’t turn out in reality the way they existed in my mind.  I’m delighted to report, though, that my fairy garden hasn’t fallen into that category. Things I’ve planted there have grown and as the summer progresses, it becomes more lush and inviting.  As often happens, this success is exhilarating and has prompted new additions to the garden. 

A family of gnomes has moved in.  They especially enjoy spending their evenings hanging out together on their garden swing. The old grandpa gnome spends most of his afternoons, after he awakens from his nap of course, sitting on the miniature version of the people-sized bench Karl made.

Three new fairy houses have appeared as well, these are made of rock and ceramic tile (the builder made them herself using the tile saw and gingerbread house patterns!), and they are elaborate domiciles for the upper crust of the garden’s fairy population. The grandest one sits prominently on a gnarled stump and while fairies fly, they welcome their grounded neighbors by supplying a rope ladder for visitors. All in all, the residents seem well satisfied with their community.

I’ve learned a lot from my fairy garden.  I’d like to say I’d learned it from the fairies, but they are elusive creatures and I have yet to converse with them.  Nevertheless, two important certainties have grown alongside the pansies and roses and canna lilies.  You have to make your own fun. Life is hard and troubles abound, they come at you uninvited and without welcome. Rejoicing in the Lord, rejoicing in the life He gives us is a choice, and the silly and whimsical help us remember that. Today is all that matters. No doubt, Wyoming’s harsh wind and cold temperatures are only, at most, six weeks away.  The fairy garden is going to suffer, plants will die.  It’s inevitable. But. We have today.  That’s actually all we do have. This day, this moment, this smile, This.

When I was a child, adulthood was defined for me as tall people who went to work (or in the case of my mother, cleaned and cooked and worked at home), did the shopping, and watched the news and weather for half an hour every evening.  Consequently, as an adult, ingrained in my mind is that watching the news and being well informed about current events is expected, essential, and responsible. 

Except.  When Walter Cronkite was talking to America, citizens trusted that what he was saying was fact without too much of his own opinion mixed in (usually).  Responsible citizens read the opinion pages to get someone else’s point of view while they trusted the rest of the paper or news anchors to give them some facsimile of unbiased news. Then, when the news was over or the paper read, people lived their lives. How far we’ve come since then!  Using Walter as the standard, news doesn’t exist anymore in America.  News online and on TV is currently designed as entertainment.  We have been conditioned to need the drama and outrage supplied by these ‘news’ sources and we’ve been taught that the rush of that adrenaline can and should be accessed many, many times during the day.  It keeps us anxious, nervous, angry.

Not one of those emotions is helpful or edifying. Each one of those emotions keeps us from what we are actually called by God to do: Rejoice in the Lord always, Trust and obey. What is the solution when that ingrained voice deep inside me says that I need to be informed? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that now that I’ve recognized the information programs available to me for what they are – titillating suckers of my time and feelings of well-being, I’m going to view them with a much more distant eye.

There’s a trail up in the snowy range that I call Waterfall Road. Karl and I like to ride our four-wheelers up to the end of the way, then sit for a moment or many, enjoying the view of Medicine Bow peak off in the distance and relishing life at the top, literally. Last week when we were there enjoying the moment, a small buck deer walked out into the clearing and checked us out before bounding off.  It’s great at the top, but it’s even better (in my view) to make the descent back down the road slowly, looking for each gift this mountain has to offer. You see, the reason I’ve named this two-track path Waterfall Road is because along the three-mile entirety of this dirt and rock jeep trail there are probably a hundred springs and waterfalls.  By July, you can be assured that the water doesn’t originate in a snowbank above, because at the road ends at nearly the crest, and it’s easy to see that the snow is melted and gone. The road meanders circuitously as it climbs along the northwest side of some unnamed mountain in the Snowy Range at somewhere near the 9,500 foot elevation mark. My guess is that deep beneath the surface of this behemoth is a huge, happy lake that can’t help but bubble out the top of the mountain in its own joy at existence.

We begin our trek down and very soon the surprises begin. Water appears straight from the dusty forest floor, beginning as a tiny percolation of sparkly moisture, dampening the rocks and dirt nearby and heralded with a patch of green moss. Humble and shy, these diminutive springs draw little attention to themselves while their small issues wander downhill to join with others, or else to sink back into the dusty ground at the base of a thirsty pine or a small stand of willow bushes.   In other places, without warning, a large section of hillside is verdant with flowers and alive with the tinkling sound of a hundred little springs. Here, the water fairly dances out of the earth in jubilation and it’s impossible to miss the spongy ground and the quickly growing stream as individual rivulets join forces.

Clearly, this process – water bubbling up and joining forces to create laughing streams and brooks racing down the steep mountainside – repeats itself countless times, both near the road so that I can stop and watch in wonder and also above me in the space between the road and the sky.  It’s clear as I continue to explore the mountain trail, as waterfalls of many sizes and exuberance show themselves at nearly every bend and wrinkle in the path.  My soul laughs as I watch the water cavort along streambeds filled with shiny pebbles and polished boulders.  Fallen tree branches add to the melee as a hundred different shades of green ferns and foliage and colonies of flowers line the route as if they were revelers enjoying a parade.

One waterfall winds through the trees higher than I can see. It trips over granite boulders and drops into deep pools, creating a deep resonant song that would make bassoons and oboes jealous. Only fifty feet later down the path, a smaller brook bounds across a fall of shale and slate rock and its sound reminds me of flutes and clarinets with percussion provided by a percussionist’s triangle.

Mostly up here, the water itself is crystal clear and breathtakingly cold. On Waterfall Road there are two exceptions, two springs that announce themselves with burnt orange. If you look closely, you see the water itself is clear but carries with it tiny specks. These two springs must have decided to come to the surface through deposits of iron ore. The resultant surprise of color is caused when the iron flakes carried to the surface rust.   

Eventually, we reach the bottom, and realize that the water magic is all behind us. Like a child at an amusement park, I long to race back up to the top and enjoy each spring, each waterfall again.  “Maybe tomorrow,” Karl tells me, and we return to camp.