The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

Genesis 2:15

I have good news from the ongoing landscape saga at Maul-Hall. It looks like “the reflecting pool” is on the verge of turning into a parking pad.

That’s right, all the digging by hand and scooping by Bobcat and scraping and tamping and shoveling and pickaxing and hauling away of dirt and more has finally given way to the introduction of crushed fill aggregate prior to laying stone for the drive.

Weather depending (both scorching heat and heavy rains have delayed the project this summer) we may be looking at some kind of a finished product in the next few days.

After that it will be a matter of planting grass and shrubs and beginning the process of fine-tuning in accordance with the master plan. The master plan, which was prepared back in the winter, has been sitting on our coffee table since early January, patiently waiting.

Patience, of course, is one of the key elements in the ongoing Rebekah & Derek story. It is how and why we are in a position to celebrate things like 47th wedding anniversaries, and long-term ministry initiatives, and completing memoirs, and renovating our 150-year-old home.

Timetable:

Sometimes I question, and wonder about what God is teaching me when I get so anxious to see results. To which God responds, “Just trust me.” Then I say something ridiculous like, “You know I am 70 now, right…?” And that leads to divine chuckling and some oblique reference to spacetime and less measurable concepts such as kairos. And then I look into the sky to see light reach my eyes from something that happened more than a million years ago, and I try so hard to put things in perspective.

But we live in chronos and so it really is hard. And God knows this about us. So we wait, but we work while we are waiting and we remember that, “You do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, ‘if the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that'” (James 4:14-15).

– DEREK