Springing for Spring

It isn't autumn season; quite the opposite, in fact, but one look at this evening's sunset and I was all whoops and cheers - dumb-founded and awe-struck, and driven to reread these lovely lines by Hopkins, in his aptly named poem, Hurrahing for Harvest. It begs repeating:

"Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet."

Christmas Time

I snapped these pictures (some were part of our Christmas photo shoot) before we left for Portland - for a day and a half, the girls and I reveled in putting Christmas lights and balls and chocolate into jars. When Dutch came home from work I was sitting at the dining table separating candy kisses into color-coordinated piles. "Do you realize you live with three children?" he asked, counting himself as the third. "Most ordinary people cannot live with this kind of temptation." I shrugged and said it was one more reason to be grateful we were leaving home for a few weeks; exempting ourselves from the struggle. It hasn't been so long since we've been gone, and we're having a marvelous time, but I must say one does begin to miss home, sun and all.

Desert Blooms

Sunday Sky

Some days, when I am suffering a loss in perspective, all I have to do is...look up.

Feeding the Ducks

Sunday Dinner

Just before dinner, Dutch and I were walking home after witnessing a spectacular sunset. We had missed the first part and I was feeling regretful. “Heather,” he said, “relax. There will be another one tomorrow!”

I was quiet for a few moments and then I said, "Have you ever stopped to think how amazing it is that God arranged the universe in such a way that the sun rises and sets every 24 hours? I have been thinking about how repetitive everything is... and I don't mean just because I am taking care of two babies! The repetition is woven into the fabric of the universe, you know? Day follows night follows day, and so on. We wake up hungry and thirsty… so we eat and drink and eat and drink and drink so more. In ten or twelve hours we are so tired we have to lay prostrate for eight hours - or in our cases, five - " I nudged him, smiling, "just so we can wake up and do it all again..."

"When you think about it, it is so obvious," Dutch said, "that God made us to be dependent..."

"Yes, it's as though He ordered everything to remind us that, just as our physical person needs nourishment, so does our spiritual person… But still I spend the better part of every day resisting the obvious. I wake up a tabula rasa - running around trying to accomplish things… and forgetting to take time just to sit at His feet, listening." I sighed heavily. “I don’t know what it will be like in eternity, but I sincerely hope that abiding in Christ won't be such a struggle…”

“Well," Dutch said, “in eternity there is no night. Christ is the sun and He illumines everything…”

His matter-of-fact application of what has always seemed, to me, an ethereal Scriptural passage caused every hair on my head to stand suddenly on end.






"The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp." ~Revelation 21.23




**For dinner we had steak and Ina Garten's Roasted Shrimp Cocktail**

Water from the Rock

"...but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." ~John 4.14























If my spirit is like a ship, sometimes all it takes is the smallest of winds to send a few waves crashing on deck to capsize me.

This weekend, it was the weather. Things had been starting to cool down… the air conditioner was being given a rest. I pulled out my bag of ‘winter’ clothes and began to thank God for getting me through another summer. But then temperatures soared back above 100 and I was suddenly in a tizzy, suppressing a sense of outrage for what in Arizona can sometimes feel like one endless summer…

All our efforts to push over and through our torpor failed … We got up early and sat outside with our iced coffees. Too hot. We decided to visit our favorite Canyon – where there is shade and sometimes water at this time of year. But by 9:30, after walking ten minutes, we were already thirsty, sweating profusely and regretful that we hadn’t brought water bottles.

Inside, the Canyon was dry and the only water we found was stagnant… One look at poor Audrey and I thought she was going to faint...






















Haven’t we had enough of this, Lord? I found myself thinking. Isn’t it about time you sent us some relief from the heat? … Why have you banished us to a place as desolate as this while everywhere else (note the two-year-old hyperbole) is busy making mulled cider and visiting pumpkin patches?



















My grumblings reverberated through the Canyon with a familiar echo… that of the Israelites when they wandered in the desert after God had freed them from slavery in Egypt.

"Why did you bring us up out of Egypt?” they asked, “to make us and our children…die of thirst?" (Exodus 17.3).

In Deuteronomy Moses puts this rumor to rest, saying, “He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. …to humble you and test you so that in the end it might go well with you.” (Deut 8.14-15).

Sad as it is to admit, I realized as I walked glumly out of the Canyon that even after all the wonders God has wrought in my life, I really am no different from the Israelites... swift to lose heart… and slow to trust.

It is so easy to accept God’s sovereign purposes for my life in the abstract – but when it comes to particulars, I am quick to call His goodness into question…

That afternoon, after listening to an exceptional sermon by my brother Shad, I considered that while there are many purposes to testing, one of them is to reveal our spiritual need... to show us that the real wilderness, the real barren, desolate place is our soul… and that without spiritual nourishment we will die.

In the desert, the Israelites thirsted and God satisfied them with water from the rock.

In the same way, God has brought forth water from the Rock that is Christ in order to satisfy me...

And yet I continue - sometimes without even realizing it - to run to other wells to try to quench my thirst… I want life to be pleasant, want to sit sipping my coffee in the shade, want to blunt my thirst with beauty… to take a walk in the Canyon and dip my feet into the cool mountain waters… and then I complain and whine when God says, NO! You may not satisfy yourself this way...


Instead I should be falling on my face in worship that He loves me enough to even show me that I am thirsty… For the worst fate that could befall me – worse than desert-living, worse than death – would be to live my whole life without ever recognizing my spiritual need.

And so today, though the sun is shining, and the desert winds are kicking up all kinds of dust, I will lift up my weary soul in praise...



"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." ~John 7.38

Fall, fall, fall!

You know you live in Arizona when it is the middle of October and:

1. You are celebrating because you can finally break out the lawn furniture and start entertaining outside.































































2. Swimming is still a major part of your life - you have playdates so the kids can swim; and you can also exercise in an outdoor pool at 6 am without shivering (I do).

3. You can now park in direct sunlight without fear of suffocation or 3rd degree burns upon returning to your car.

4. You can open all the doors and windows for most of the day and all of the night just to let in the cool breeze.

5. You can go for morning walks without fear of cursing in front of the children.

6. You can go to an outdoor park at noon without fear of getting sunstroke.

7. You put on a sweater and flats, then start to sweat so you change back into your sleeveless shirt and sandals.

8. You find yourself saying how amazing the sunsets are because now you can finally go outside to watch them.

9. When you go for your evening walk you no longer fear an unseemly encounter with a rattle snake - now's hibernating season.

10. You still drink iced coffee and enjoy it just as much (more) as if it were July.

The Real Deal

In so many “mommy blogs” the stunning photographs and whimsical little anecdotes all seem to tell the same story: My family is so beautiful and my life is so wonderful. There are never any blips on our radar and we move in a landscape of neverending joy and inspiration… but this is a ruse.

You don’t have to be a very astute observer of the human experience to recognize that real life involves more than just hitting the high notes. It has been a long time since I studied music theory but if I remember correctly there are not only low notes, but sharp ones as well.

So I was not surprised to find that several people, friends who have known me through many trials, wrote in response to my September post to ask, is this really true? Do you really love where you live?

To these I very humbly offer the following addendum:

I am a traditionalist by nature. I like to wear sweaters and drink coffee, warm; and leaves that change color in the fall; and pumpkins and Christmas trees and trees that grow up tall in my backyard. I am an ocean and not a mountain girl.

But I live in the desert where fall comes on late and lasts only an instant (Saturday's high was 103); where instead of trees, Agave and golden barrel and saguaro cacti greet me when I walk outside my door; where lizards and snakes, coyotes and quail, jack rabbits and bobcats (really) and stink bugs and javelina all run wild in my neighborhood.

By 7 o’clock in the morning it is so bright you would swear it was 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

But this is where I live.

And where I live is beautiful. And I really do love it.

Besides, if we always get exactly what we want in life then we miss out on a lot of the adventure. Wasn’t it Marcel Proust who said, “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes?”

Arizona is where God has planted me. And as a seed I can either settle in and absorb the nutrients or (mad suicidal effort) kick away the soil. I spent too much time trying the latter anyway and discovered it is a wasted effort.

It may be warm, but there is so much – like the sky and the mountains and the light of early mornings – that is spectacularly beautiful. Besides, as this picture so perfectly illustrates, no skies are cloudless … there is always something obscuring the view.

The view from my front yard...

It's taken me some time but I can say with full confidence: I love where I live.