There is so much to catch you up on. When I wrote to you last towards the end of March, I told you a little bit more about a book that I have been working on. I have given it a working title, "Pine Trees Will Grow," a reference from Isaiah 55:13. There won't be a test later on this, but I assure you, this will be an anchor to the point of this letter.
At any rate, its always a bit weird to poke your head in after an extended absence. I'm feeling a tension between two voices saying, "where should I start" with a side of "you haven't kept to the word that you set out to do." I am one of those people with a steady stream of internal thoughts that keep telling me none of this matters. And you know what, maybe it doesn't. I can confidently say that after a season that has been primarily transitional and very packed, I feel more excited and ready to keep pushing forward than ever before.
Around the end of March, a few big pieces of our lives began to shift. We moved physical homes, and Chad took a turn in his career. We tend to go big or go home in this family, so lumping together significant changes is par for the course. One of us in our marriage thrives on this, and the other one of us, no matter how good the change, tends to feel like each step is like walking in thick, wet mud. That would be me, of course. Add onto it the fact that my parents have relocated from a small town by the name of Klamath Falls, Oregon, after seventy years to just down the road from us, and it's safe to say that this season is continuing the theme that I have been exploring this year. Every look, I see something entirely NEW.
About six weeks ago, we took a trip to a magical place called Lost Valley Ranch in Colorado. This is not a place you find by chance. You journey down a narrow, winding, steep-cliffed dirt road until you cross the threshold of a cattle guard and sign that welcomes you into a very sacred place. I have written before about how the acres that occupy this dude ranch were miraculously saved from a wildfire many years ago. Nearly every piece of land adjacent to it was devastated by the fire. You can tell because fires speak clearly. They sweep through quickly and without notice, and they leave their mark. It's hard to deny a fire. Years later, a once lush land still lies primarily barren. That is until you look a little bit closer. As our friend pointed out, something else is happening. Everywhere you look, there is something new emerging. New wildlife wandering the land, and fresh flowers and grasses cover the forest floor. Life that didn't exist before the fire and now calling this place home. NEW. Everything, even fire, has a purpose.
"In 2020, nearly 60,000 wildfires raged across the United States, burning a record-breaking 10.3 million acres. The fires weren't just frequent; they reached epic proportions: California and Colorado recorded their biggest fires ever, and in early October, 65 large fires were burning in California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and, in smaller instances, five other states. In all, the blazes consumed more than 2 million acres." (Reference)
I grew up in Southern Oregon and can attest to the fact that forest fires have been happening more frequently and intensely in the past decade. I commented one of the last times I visited that it feels like the land is sucking the water out of your body; it is so dry. Without water, it is hard to survive, much less thrive.
Our Indigenous people knew this. They were more in touch with the land around them than we are today. They understood what the land was asking of us and what it means to participate in its life cycle. At least in part, that involved fire, or more specifically, a controlled burn. From what I can make of it, they understood that lighting and tending to some kinds of fires could prevent catastrophic fires from happening in the future. In other words, cooperating with the ways God created the earth and instructed us to live may involve periodically lighting some things on fire. It most certainly will include paying attention, and best as I can tell, there are dire consequences should we drift too far away from these plans.
God created the earth before He put us here to tend to it. It appears that the farther removed we are from the Creation story, the less we pay attention to the land we occupy. We are consumer-minded people giving barely a second thought to our resources and seeing the effect everywhere we look. Instead of looking back to how we were intended to live, our path is forward at all costs. The result? Little fires are being lit everywhere. Some are burning our land; others are burning down the edges of anything resembling a healthy culture. Alarms are sounding. The question bouncing around in my head lately is this; are we too late?
Chad and I took a trip in April to Wichita, Kansas. We had booked this time away a few months back to celebrate his birthday. The main goal of this trip was to play some golf and reconnect as a couple amid a wobbly and transitional season. We succeeded at playing some good golf but admittedly had some shaky moments as a couple. I am in the reality camp when it comes to marriage. At least for us, it has been BOTH the honor of my life to be married to Chad, AND in some seasons, it has felt heavy and laborious.
On a particularly heavy morning, Chad and I walked into a coffee shop we had visited the previous day. The morning line was long, leaving us winding around as if we were to get on a ride at Disney. At one point, the line stopped, and my eyes were drawn to these beautifully hand-crafted wooded coffee scoops. A card was sitting next to them with a note from the craftsman himself.
The top of the card read the words "Oregon Myrtlewood." I was immediately intrigued. Keep in mind we are in the middle of Kansas, nowhere near the state I grew up in. As I quickly scanned, I came to a line that said this. "I buy most of my Myrtlewood from a dealer in Klamath Falls, Oregon." My heart skipped a beat. If you remember from the beginning of this letter, I was born and raised in Klamath Falls, OR. Was this a wink from God or just a happy coincidence?
I read on. The very last line of description read this. "Oregon Myrtle is a cousin of the Myrtle growing in the Holy Land and referenced in Isaiah 55:13."
Tears welled up in my eyes as I turned to Chad. I literally could not believe what I had just read. A man named John Buckner who had devoted much of his life to the craft of woodturning in the middle of Kansas has just linked together two very specific and significant pieces of my life. I immediately bought two coffee scoops, took a couple of the cards he had left, and proceeded to drink my coffee in amazement over what had just happened. You don't get many moments like this in life. Or maybe you do. Perhaps they are happening all around us, and we are simply not looking for them.
At any rate, I couldn't shake what had just happened. I told Chad that I wanted to contact John to see if, by chance, he had time to meet before we left Kansas. He had to know that his work wasn't in vain. I wanted to tell him that God spoke to an ordinary young lady in the middle of Kansas through his coffee scoop.
I texted John, and we met him at Applebee's the next day around 5 pm. He pulled up in his yellow Dodge Nitro that he affectionately calls the sunbeam. He bought this car so he would be easy to notice when he is meeting up with people. This is a thing John does, I found out. He is an 88-year-old man and only child who never married or had children, but that has no measure of his legacy. I found out that he was a college music professor and mentors young men and women in the craft of woodturning. I get the sense he is a legend in his own right, and to this day, I wonder if he was less a human and more an angel. Either way, he has left a mark on me. We talked for hours and then went for a tour of his wood shop. All along the way, we both smiled big over that ordained moment in time. I could write a whole book on this day. A short but powerful story about the time I heard God speak in the most unexpected places.
I told John about my book. About how I had been working on it for years now and how I often wonder if it matters. I told him about how this moment in time was the kindest possible way for God to say, "I see you." I told him how his coffee scoop and his whimsical personality found me in a not-so-great moment and that I guess that is what grace is anyhow.
So what does this have to do with fires? A lot, actually, but I'll save that for another time. As I was telling John about the title of my book through tears, he mentioned to me that one of his favorite all-time verses is the one that comes before it. The last two verses of this chapter stopped me in my tracks over two years ago, and since then, I have been setting out to put words to how the kindness of God met me in my darkest moments.
Isaiah 55:12-13, in the EASY version says this:
You will leave that foreign land with joy!
You will travel home with peace in your minds.
The mountains and the hills will sing with joy as you travel past.
The trees in the fields will clap their hands together!
Where thorn bushes have been growing, pine trees will grow instead.
Myrtle bushes will grow where there are weeds now.
Those things will show everyone that the LORD is great.
It will be a sign to the people forever.
This is what we are going for—a place where pine trees will grow. We journey through deserts and valleys along winding roads. We inevitably face fire, and we build up and tear down. We walk through unimaginable circumstances, some of our own doing and others that have been done to us. A journey that asks much and requires much but is full of the steady promises of God. These are the last two verses of this chapter and words that, over a few years, have seeped through layers of pain and confusion and have come into full focus.
Those things will show everyone that the LORD is great.
It will be a sign to the people forever.
This is what I desire for our broken and confused world. To see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Hello again. Lets do this.
Coffee Scoops, Wichita, Kansas, Forest Fires and Hearing God Speak
as one who has walked thru 3 fires on our Colorado land (Crystal, High Park and Cameron peak), who hasn't written in ages as the "does this even matter" voice seems to have become so loud, this post ministers to me deeply. thank you.