Looking over pictures from the last couple of weeks, the beauty of answered prayers is just impressed on my mind.
And how many answered prayers! Recent and distant, present and past, big and small.
I think of how dry and drought-stricken we were a year ago. How many promising storms we watched build and dissipate without leaving us a drop of rain. I remember how short and stubbly the pastures were, how the grass headed out in June when it was barely six inches tall. I remember the dust we kicked up on the trail, the cracks in the earth. I remember the feelings of uncertainty and seeing the lines of care deepen on the faces that I love.
But God is a God who sees, hears, and provides. He listens. I look at these photographs and see green – so much of it! I see answered prayers.
He has provided rain. Good grass and hayfields that promise a yield. Healthy livestock. Good neighbors.
Then my mind wanders a little father back, to the life I was living two short years ago. The loneliness and unexplainable longings, the dreams and hopes and desires that had gotten snuffed out with the cares of life. My love of writing. My love of photography. My love of the outdoors and hard work. The desire to fit in somewhere. To belong somewhere. To belong to someone.
Then I look at these photographs that I took in the span of a single week and I see answered prayer after answered prayer.
God has provided a community. Belonging. Family. Friends. So much beauty to enjoy. Good work to do. A loving husband to walk alongside.
God is so good. All the time.
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As spring has emerged, it has been a delight to watch leaf after leaf poke up from the ground and begin to grow. Day by day, I can see changes as my perennials have doubled in size, and it is sheer joy to see plants that I tended faithfully last summer grow with even greater vigor this year, spreading out and sending up new shoots! My one lupine seedling that survived the summer heat is now a huge plant, and I can’t wait to see what the flowers are like when it blooms this year!
But what would happen if, instead of delighting in my own garden, I compare what I have to my neighbor’s? What if, instead of seeing the beauty in what I’ve successfully grown, I resent what my neighbor can grow that I cannot, or what she has spent years cultivating that I only planted last year? Do this for long enough or with great enough intensity, and your own garden with all its beauty and its potential, will wilt and die.
Isn’t life like that? What we have at any given time is usually what we’ve cultivated over the last months or years of our lives. Sometimes what we try to cultivate just doesn’t grow, or it doesn’t flourish and we finally realize it’s time to uproot that thing and put our efforts elsewhere. Then, sometimes, we look at our neighbor and the life she is living and we imagine that our life should look just like that. We’re angry that it doesn’t and we begin to resent her. But the crazy thing is, so often what she has that we are resenting isn’t even what we tried to grow, if we’re honest with ourselves! I’m sure all of us have been there.
Jealousy kills. It’s like spraying herbicide onto your neighbor’s garden out of spite, and killing your own garden with the drift instead. We need to learn to rejoice in the life that we’ve been given, the garden that God is allowing us to cultivate. Quit staring at your neighbor’s garden, quit envying what she has that you don’t have. Quit comparing, and quit telling yourself that you deserve her life. God has given you a beautiful life!
Tend your own garden. And find joy in the beauty that’s there.
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It slowly, sweetly rained for the better part of 36 hours, filling every bucket and pan and tub that was out in the yard, making the corral blessedly muddy and every little slope a running stream. Each and every step was a splash and splatter of water and mud and the pups endlessly tracked into the kitchen, and further into the house if I wasn’t quick enough. It was the best rain. The kind that comes when we need it most. The best.
The longer the winter, the sweeter the spring. The harder the work, the better the rest. The hotter the day, the greater the refreshment of the evening coolness. The longer the loneliness, the sweeter “I love you.”
The greater the need, the greater the relief when the need is met.
So rain, any rain when it is needed desperately, is the best rain. And the longer it comes, the better it gets. I love to see it streaming down the windowpanes, a sight we haven’t seen in so long, running in rivulets down the driveway and making ruts and mud and such a mess, such a wonderful, beautiful mess! It came slow enough that the thirsty ground was able to drink it almost all up, and any that is left will put water in our dams.
I see relief in the landscape, the animals, the trees and grasses and other plants. The calves looked happier, playing in the rain rather than choking on dust. Cheerful little ducks bounce around in the puddles along our driveway. Cows are glad not to be walking a mile to get to water, and the dogs are just always happy. In a matter of 24 hours, the grass was greener, taller, thicker, and it seems that the alfalfa began to spring up in that short time as well. The fruit trees and the perennial garden look better and better, and the ponderosas are rich and dark, with none of the sickly, yellowish cast they had in the later part of the winter. I can’t wait to see what everything looks like in a week, after we get a little heat and sun on the watered ground!
The rain tapered off yesterday, but we have still had periods of mist and light showers, and the dampness is refreshing and glorious. An answer to so many prayers.
Yes, indeed. It was the best rain.
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I knew I was getting close to (or had passed) my eight year anniversary writing this little blog, and I’ve been wanting to write a little something to that effect, and in gratitude for the people who read my blog. Some of you have been following along for years, and that means a lot to me. So to satisfy my curiosity I went back in my archives and, what do you know, eight years ago today I published my first post!
As I look back at some of my early blog content, a lot of things bounce around inside my head. One, what in the world was I doing with that camera? There are a few good pictures, mostly by accident. But more importantly I’m reminded of the excitement and difficulty of moving to South Dakota, of moving into an 800 square foot cabin with my parents and two of my three sisters, of sharing a bedroom with siblings as an adult, of starting over as an adult, beginning a new life in a new place and of learning to trust God with all the outcomes.
I look back and see so much change. I see struggles and losses and failures and dreams that were made and broken. I see so much growth – personal, emotional, relational, and spiritual. Yet I see at the same time I see so much sameness, heart longings that made no sense at the time, common threads woven through my entire life that speak to God’s love and His authorship of even our hopes and dreams.
I see seeds of desires that God has satisfied, one way or another, in His own time. I look at the beauty I was trying to capture with my camera, the things that tugged at my heart strings, and it amazes me to think that I am so wonderfully immersed in those things my heart was just starting to love. I look back at my early attempts at gardening, my love of the beauty of the Hills and the beauty of the agricultural lifestyle, and I see seeds for where God finally planted me. And then I look back further. When I was 10 or so, I had a memory book that had questions and space for written answers. One of the questions was “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “I want to live in South Dakota and have horses.” Little did my 10-year-old self know that it would take 15 years to get to South Dakota, but that I would in fact get here! And little did I know in 2015 when I was working for the rancher who runs cows on my family’s place, and falling in love with the work and the outdoors and the dirt and the sweat and the smell of horses and cows, that eight years later I would be the wife of a rancher and a neighbor to the rancher I had worked for. Funny how life works. Correction, funny how God works. Sometimes those heart longings that make no sense are God’s way of foreshadowing the work He’s doing.
I look back on my early blogging and see an at times very lonely 20-something single gal, with desires that could only be satisfied by God in His own timing, doing her best to thrive where she was, growing in her trust of God, knowing that God is a loving God Who knows our needs and even cares about our heart desires, clinging to some of those hopes and dreams that honestly seemed hopeless, dreams of marriage and a little home in the Hills and a garden and maybe a couple of chickens.
It’s like a garden. The first year you plant perennials, some do well, some don’t. Some die off over winter, others come back pretty hardily. There is growth in those first few years, and then they just take off and there is no stopping them. That’s the impression I have of my life, looking back on the 8 years since starting this blog, and the 8 years, 1 month, and 21 days since moving here. I see seeds planted that were slow to take off. Some did well but were pruned out eventually. Other just died off, and that’s fine. Others were slow to get started and have just exploded.
Life has overflowed. I came here with my books and my family and a college degree, and that was about it. I had no friends here, no community, a jumbled mess of recently-rediscovered dreams and disappointed hopes, and I hoped I would find somewhere I belonged. God has given me so much. He has brought struggle and loneliness and has allowed pain, and has been faithful through it. He has given me a life I love with a husband I adore, work to do with a new family that feels like blood family in a community that warms my heart and brings so much meaning to life. He has brought into my life all the spice and savor and sweetness I had dreamed of, and then more.
So I’m just sitting here thanking God for eight years in South Dakota, and eight years of this blog, and for those of you who read this blog and let me know when it touches your hearts. I’m thankful for growth. I’m thankful for change and sameness. I’m thankful for dreams and answers to prayer. I’m just thankful.
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“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
Hans Christian Andersen
We thank God before meals for the food that He provides…But I doubt that we always feel the full magnitude of what all we are thanking Him for. It isn’t just that He provides. It isn’t just that there is food on the table. It isn’t just the joy of being able to put nourishing, homemade food in front of family or friends, or to gift someone a loaf of bread. When was the last time I thanked God for the sense of taste? Of giving us the capacity to enjoy a meal, not just for the nourishment but for the pleasure of eating it? God didn’t have to create us with a sense of taste, with the ability to actually find wholesome pleasure in a meal, to be able to enjoy delicious food. But He did. He could have made the satisfaction of our basic needs boring and uninteresting, but He didn’t.
So I’m thankful for the ordinary joy of ordinary food, for the pleasure of a good meal, and for a God who is glorified when we enjoy what He created for our enjoyment!
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“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
Hans Christian Andersen
Romans 1:20 talks about how God’s divine attributes are clearly perceived in His creation design. If you want to see miracles, just look at the beauty of this earth! Creation just sings that there is a God who created all that we see and loves what He created! Few things convince me of this more than the joy God’s furred and feathered creatures bring to His humans, the deep love that can be shared between a human and an animal and yes, I believe it is reciprocal. I think animals have way more to their minds than we give them credit for, much more capacity for emotion and connection. It goes beyond instinct. And I believe that this intellect and intuition is something that brings glory to the Creator! God didn’t need to create any of what He created, and He sure didn’t need to create a human-animal connection that is so joy-giving. Yet what He created He looked at and “saw that it was good.” Isn’t it amazing that He did what He did? That He has created a world that can bring so much joy and goodness and pleasure? Because He didn’t need to.
The delight and peace I feel with my animals is one of those ordinary joys that really is anything but ordinary.
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