The scars of the past reveal two things about us. For one thing, they remind us we have been injured. Secondly, they indicate healing has happened. The important thing to note here is that we are free to focus our attention on either of these two facts. If we choose, we can allow our scars to keep our injuries ever before us. We can permit them to nag us with repeated anxiety. We can rapidly recall all those folk who have caused us pain. We can continually curse the circumstances that have hurt us. If we get angry enough, we can even shake our fist at God for allowing us to have troubled times.
Bathing ourselves in self-pity, we may find a few people who will join us in our tub of tears. Some, whose scars are fresh and wounds open, may find our whining attractive and surround us with an insidious pity party. Yes, scars can be a terrible reminder of the bad things which have happened to us. Yet, if we surround ourselves with folk who keep us focused on the hurt, we will never learn the lesson of our scars.
On the other hand, however, our scars can help us focus on healing rather than hurt. If we choose, we may gratefully remember the processes of healing as our wounds were repaired.
From physical injury to spiritual pain we saw forgiveness and grace at work. The scars of both instill memories of hope as we trust God’s healing power.
We may finger lovingly the pages of scripture that brought health to our souls. In love, we may rejoice over the growth that came through our painful chastisements. In faith, we may place the scars of our past into the nail-scarred hands of Jesus, as we celebrate the future. Yes, scars are signs that healing has happened. How do you see your scars?
These are my thoughts on the income inequality issue. As a long-time business manager and owner I can tell you that while the thought of improving income to the lowest paid among us seems like a generous thing to do, and is probably a good campaign tactic for Democrats, it will backfire. What always happens when the minimum wage is raised is that ALL employees expect a commensurate raise in order to “maintain scale”. American workers demand income inequity. This is how they measure their success.
Small adjustments don’t have a devastating effect, but an increase from $7.25 to $10.10[3] will mean either everyone gets a $3.00 an hour raise or entry level employees will be making as much as those who have been working hard for several years.
This across the board raise in salaries will be a major hit to the labor cost of every company in America. Some companies will respond with lay-offs of the least essential personnel. Most will respond by increasing the price of everything they make or do, thus pushing the burden of this wage increase back on the people it was supposed to help. The end result is that no one benefits, everything simply gets more expensive… again.
As I see it, there are only two ways to achieve the leveling effect the liberals seek:
How well do you handle reconciliation? Do you dread the process of making up? Do you enjoy clinging to the pain of past hurts? Does pride prohibit your assuming any responsibility for the conflict? Perhaps it is the discomfort of having to initiate the opening of old wounds and the cleansing of festered relationships that frightens you away from the peace table. Your hesitancy to apologize or suggest improved relationships may stem from your fear of being rejected. There are numerous reasons why reconciliation is avoided. Yet, it is one of life’s most rewarding experiences. There is no joy like the joy of being friends again. There is no love like the love from someone who has been estranged. There is no peace like the peace of being accepted and restored.
How strange that something as beneficial to our emotional and physical health as reconciliation is postponed or ignored altogether. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies because we never allow our enemies to become our friends again. It is not so much that we keep returning evil for evil. It is the fact that we do nothing to aid the peace process. We suffer in silence and build up tons of unnecessary anger. When a relationship is strained we read into every conversation and action the worst possible interpretation. We sin against our own spiritual health by keeping a conflict alive in our imaginations when, in reality, a conflict no longer exists.
Jesus understood the dynamics of reconciliation and good relationships. In essence He said if someone hits us on one cheek do not hit back but turn the other cheek. In other words, someone has to take the last blow. Someone has to say, “Enough is enough. Let us stop hurting one another and begin to build a better relationship.” The truth of the matter is that life is not always fair. Everything does not come out even. Sometimes we have to give more than it seems we get. However, when friendships are restored we all get more than we deserve. It is a grace rebate and a bonus for having the courage to go the second mile.
My wife and I moved here to the Great Smoky Mountains region of east Tennessee in December of 2001. We moved here from St. Louis. Marie was born and raised in St. Louis, a flat-lander and city girl all her life – up to that point. I’d been a gypsy: my family was always on the move but we tended to end up most in Texas, North Dakota, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri. Flat lands. Marie and I had both traveled through mountains but living on one was a new experience for both of us. One we looked forward too.
Mountain living offers some unique challenges. It shares many of the attributes of any rural living. Most of these I consider an advantage. But add to those the fact that nothing is flat. Anywhere. Everything is on a slope of some degree. Some is mild: a mere incline. Some so steep and boulder-strewn you need rock climber experience to get up or down that face. The majority of the land we purchased is steep, rocky and heavily forested. About two acres are cleared. In this space we’ve installed two homes – one for my mother, one for us – two storage buildings, a large workshop, and two covered dog pens.
Flat Spots
The first challenge in slope-side living is building buildings. Most buildings require a flat spot to sit on. So we must first build the flat spots. This is done with a track hoe or bulldozer. Small flat spots can be done with a Bobcat equipped with a bucket. We don’t want to be hauling dirt in or out if we can avoid it, so we cut into the slope on one side, move the dirt to the low side and pack it firmly. An experienced operator knows just how much to remove to establish a level spot the proper width – and, somehow, manages to get it quite level, needing only tweaking with a transit. This ability amazes me: Getting anything level or plumb by eye while working on a slope is more difficult than you might think. At least, it is for me, a good level is an essential tool here. From that point, home construction moves on normally.
Rental Cabins in Gatlinburg
Some buildings, especially smaller ones can forego the flat-spotting and be built on pylons or posts anchored into the ground. There are rental cabins near Gatlinburg that have their front porch at ground level and the rest are flown over the edge of a steep slope on tall posts. They look precarious!
Access
Gaining access to your property from the nearest roadway can be an issue too. Most residents here don’t want to buy a tract of land then build their home next to the road just for convenient access. Most prefer some seclusion, whether it’s for privacy or to facilitate the illusion of being completely isolated from the rest of the world. Though some I’ve seen aren’t far from that!
Our home at the top of an 85 foot long, 30° steep driveway. 4WD is required.
Sometimes times a driveway can be bulldozed up a steep slope in a straight line from road to home. If you have four-wheel drive you can generally get up such a drive, but coming down can result in quite a thrill ride when it’s icy! For a less insane angle of incline the drive needs to snake side to side with switch-backs to reverse direction or cut in from a distant edge of the property and wind its way up and across.
One of the bigger problems is that anytime you cut into the soil, you create an erosion hazard. Heavy rains cause the exposed soil to wash down into your driveway, often burying the gravel under lots of mucky red clay ooze. Retaining walls help to prevent erosion, but inflate the cost of the driveway exponentially.
To get building materials in – especially a concrete truck – the driveway needs to be wide enough and substantial enough to handle that traffic. Around here most concrete companies have all-wheel drive, front discharge concrete trucks that will climb like a goat, but they still weigh many tons and need some space to maneuver.
Once, I saw materials being brought in by helicopter!
Run-off Control
Once the construction is done, water routing comes into play. Ditches, culverts (called “tiles” around here, even if they’re steel or plastic and 36 inches in diameter) and buried drains all come into play to gather, direct and dispose of rain run-off and minimize erosion damage.
Once this is done we can set about trying to establish a lawn in the cleared area around the house and garden beds for food and/or flowers.
Gardens are especially tricky. For my first attempt at a vegetable garden I chose the most level spot on our property, tilled up an 8 x 12 foot patch and used a cultivator to drag out the grass clumps and roots. Using a square-nose spade to remove the grass would have been cleaner, but the only good top soil here is the top 2 inches where the grass grows (we bought a place that had been settled 12 years before and had a lawn growing already). I wanted to keep that top soil if I could because the red clay below is awful for growing anything.
I planted that little garden patch and was amazed after each rain to find my seedling plants wandering about. What were nice neat rows were zig-zags. The radishes were now cohabitating with the lettuce. Everything was out of whack. Fortunately most of the seedlings did survive their rides and went on to put down longer roots to better affix themselves in one place.
That nice topsoil, however, was making a slow march toward the drainage ditch. I needed to do something. If my test garden worked out, I wanted to enlarge it the following year. But this would mean spreading up onto steeper slopes, and more tilled soil would mean more erosion. How could I keep the soil in place?
I thought about terracing. But this would require either many narrow strips or 3 foot high retainer walls in some places. This would make getting equipment – like a regular tiller – into and out of the terraces complicated.
Then I stumbled onto the idea of small raised beds. I built a series of 4 x 4 foot garden boxes, dug in the high corners, built up the lowest corners and have been quite happy with this for the past four years. In fact, I was so happy with this system that I expanded from my original six boxes to 22!
Last year I did some sprucing up by adding low walls between the boxes, weed fabric over the grass in between and woodchips over the fabric. This looks nice, provides me a non-muddy (soggy after a rain, but not muddy) place to kneel, and keeps the mixture of grass and weeds that served as a lawn from polluting my vegetables when I had to go through with a string trimmer to hack them down to size. The trimmer threw all that debris right into my boxes. Rinsing dead grass out of my crinkly lettuce leaves was a chore. Weed seeds invaded the boxes far more vehemently than normal, too. Paving the walkways between boxes eliminates most of this, and helps keep moisture in the soil.
It’s not perfect. But it’s better.
I’m getting a little long winded here, I’ll pick it up again next time, when I’ll look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of slope side living.
One of my wife’s co-workers recently related an attempt to teach her 10 year old son responsibility. He wanted a puppy. She knew a puppy was a large undertaking, so she suggested trying something a little less challenging at first; like a turtle.
She bought a small turtle and a bowl, he named the turtle Fred. For a while things went well and she was impressed with the amount of care and attention her son lavished on Fred. But after a few weeks, that interest began to wane. After a few more weeks, Fred wasn’t looking so good. He wasn’t smelling so good either. She suggested that her son should clean out the bowl. He reluctantly agreed. Continue reading “Ode to Fred – a Pet Tale”
When the Christmas activity is over, what then? When the carols have faded away, the gift wrapping paper has been burned, and families have returned, what then? When the star of Bethlehem has faded into the starless heavens of human activity, what then? Is there a letdown in your life when the most exciting season of the year has ended? Do you search diligently for something to replace the emotional high of Christmas festivities? Yes, it happens to all of us to some degree. but it should not be that way.
Depression after Christmas may indicate that we missed the real meaning of His birth. Christmas is not an end. It is a beginning. It is not the only joyous time of the year, but a symbol of the joy we may have every day in Christ. To be sad after Christmas may be a natural response to the absence of loved ones and family activities. However, there can be a lingering joy of memories and meaningful times of worship.
From a spiritual perspective Christmas should be a revival of our zest for living. It should renew our capacity to trust God and one another for a happiness that is not seasonal. It should revitalize our perception of the gift of forgiveness, love and grace, which is really what that manger birth was all about.
To be sad after Christmas is to forget that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. The new year comes to remind us that old things have passed away and that in Christ we find a place to begin again. Every day is brighter because of that Christmas star. Every song is sweeter because the angels sang. Here is where a merry Christmas gives rise to a happy New Year.
I am normally up somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00 AM every day. Most days when I get up, slide my feet into my slippers, grab my robe from the hook on my closet door and head for the kitchen to make coffee, Cochise will get out of his snuggle-bed at the foot of our bed and come padding down the hall behind me. I turn right into the kitchen, he turns left into the living room, settles onto a quilt near the fireplace and goes back to sleep. After the coffee is setup I’ll give his ears a light scratching just to tell him I appreciate his company then I settle into my easy chair with my Bible to do some reading while it’s quiet. Blondie gets up when Marie does; around 6:00.
This morning I got up and Blondie came bounding down the hall after me. She was all wound up! She wanted to wrestle and was thumping (body slamming) my chair to get me to scratch her. She’d flop onto the floor and roll up on her back for a belly rub… way more energetic than she normally was at this hour of the morning. I wondered if she was excited about it being Christmas morning. She DID go into the dining room to look at the tree and sniff the packages a couple of times. But how would she know anything about Christmas day?
We are creatures created for growth. This process starts at conception and continues throughout our lives. Even when our bodies seem to be growing backwards; as we lose our hair and our bodies wither, our minds and our spiritual lives continue to grow and develop.
Christians are part of God’s growing process, His tools in perfecting and completing His creation. The more we grow personally, the more useful we are to God. A single mustard seed; one of the smallest seeds in nature, is of little use by itself but, if planted, the mustard plant that grows from it; the largest of all herbs, offers shelter to small creatures and will produce many more mustard seeds. We can be like that seed if we choose well. Continue reading “Godly Growth”
The Christmas event captures our attention in many ways. Its heavenly drama accents the extent of diving participation. Its earthly response gives evidence of human anticipation. There are many impressive features of that nativity night which enable us to grasp the gospel of Christmas.
The humble setting in which it all occurred reveals the condescending nature of God. The Lord Jesus came from heaven’s glory to be birthed with the crudest of maternity care. If God would stoop to a lowly stable to usher in His Son, then surely He would stoop to share with lowly sinners His love and grace. How could it be that the shepherds, noted for their simplicity and rugged life style, were the first to come? Was it not indicative of the fact that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost? The wise men came because their scholarly insight gave them a special revelation of God’s activity. The simplest and the wisest as well as the poorest and the richest were all to share in this redeeming light.
The angelic choir reminds us that the coming of Christ was an event to celebrate. Because on that night “the heavens declared the glory of God,” today we have a reason to sing. That first Christmas music has put a song in every believer’s heart. It has been the inspiration of all our singing which truly magnifies the gospel.
The threat of Herod was but a parable of the kind of world into which our Lord had come. It was a foreshadowing of the cross which would eventually result in His painful, yet loving, sacrifice. The exodus from Egypt was symbolic of God’s protection and care. The Herods of the world would not have the last word. Crucifixion would give rise to resurrection and in that power His word would go forth. Hallelujah what a Savior!
In our world today of religious conglomerates, church has become big business. As we observe the electronic churches with their television personalities taking in their millions, we are tempted to ask, Is God for sale? Have we packaged religion in neat, syrupy sermons and wrapped it in emotionally draining songs to give it consumer appeal? Have we resorted to the gimmicks of Wall Street rather than the Golgotha inspired sacrifices of the New Testament? Have we allowed the search for mammon to hinder our search for souls?
Hopefully, these questions represent the extreme and the religious landscape is not what it appears. Surely the manufacturers of high-powered religious showmanship are sincere even though their product is sometimes shallow and misleading. Surely the people of God will become less gullible when they realize that para-church never becomes the full body of Christ.
It would certainly be unkind and unnecessary to discount any good from these hyper salespeople of religion. Yet, it would be devastating if that were all we had. We must never forsake the assembling of ourselves together as a body of believers to minister to one another in a humble, sincere and Godly way. There is something quite profound when two or three are gathered together in His name and God is present.
The scars of the past reveal two things about us. For one thing, they remind us we have been injured. Secondly, they indicate healing has happened. The important thing to note here is that we are free to focus our attention on either of these two facts. If we choose, we can allow our scars to keep our injuries ever before us. We can permit them to nag us with repeated anxiety. We can rapidly recall all those folk who have caused us pain. We can continually curse the circumstances that have hurt us. If we get angry enough, we can even shake our fist at God for allowing us to have troubled times. 
