Thin Places

Thin places are amazing places.  Like an early morning mist, they are elusive and often change location in a moment.  They are well camouflaged, so much so in fact that most people run right past them never even knowing they are there.  Worse still, they often run right through the middle of them, busy, hurried, and oblivious. Like rushing across so much gold in the sand beneath our feet. Such loss.

Thin places, in Celtic lore, are those places where exists only a thin separation between heaven and earth.  A place where we can be in the earthly realm and in heaven all at the same time.  A thin place is where the holiness of the Eternal can be seen, felt, and experienced on this side of the veil that separates mortal from immortal.

Some thin places seem to stay in the same place. They don’t always move around, though it seems that mostly they do.  I have experienced a thin place, close in perception of the Presence of God while standing on familiar ground.  I know I am in a thin place every time at Dinosaur National Monument.  Each time I go I feel heaven so close. Strange, so many of the scientists who study ancient species believe their findings separate man from God.  When I am there I feel even closer.  God. Creator. Savior.  He first thought about dinosaurs and they did not fall apart from His knowledge. He thinks about me too.  Nothing that happens to me is apart from him.  Such care.  I sense creation in the presence of the ancient.

There is a thin place in the mountains where I live.  Often times I find it hovering over the town. Even more I find it hovering over our home just outside of town.  When I cannot find it there I can usually find it in the lonesome trails that are minutes from my front door. It is strong when I am alone.  Stronger still when I share it with others, but that kind is even more rare.  Finding two humans in the same heart at the same moment doesn’t happen often..

Thin places are healing, warm, and restorative places to be.  You can only experience them by first finding them.  You can stumble across them accidental, but will notice only once your senses are tuned to find them.  Loving God and loving folks is the best antennae for tuning into the presence of a thin place.  It makes them stand out more. They are more common than you think.  You just have to look for them, feel for them, and long for them. The best way to increase your odds of finding thin places it to linger longer than necessary once you have found one.  Get to know it.  Get accustomed to it.  Allow your pallet to be changed to long for its taste.  Perceive it, sense it, explore it.

Thin places are miraculous.  The downside is that when miracle becomes the rule then law becomes the exception.  That is why we cannot stay in a thin place, or if we do the thin place seems to move on away from us.  Thin places are special places.  They are places where we love to be.  I think that God loves to meet us there.  A lot like He did with Adam in Eden.

Thin places can go away in an instance.  A clumsy disregard for what is holy, an attempt to explain or somehow invite yourself to partner with it, and poof, there it goes.  Jesus invited three of his disciples to join him in a thin place.  Moses and Elijah came down to meet them.  Peter opened his mouth.  First mistake in a thin place.  Don’t pollute the air with what you have to say.  He tried to get involved, adding man efforts to a God event.  Second mistake.  Then it was over. Vanished and gone.  I wonder how long it could have lasted if he had just been.  I wonder if Jesus was disappointed.

You cannot make a thin place.  It simply is.  It is there.  It is just beyond the common.  It is waiting for you to take the time and to dream the dream of finding and letting it wash over you like a shower.  A baptism of closeness to the One who created  you, me, and the thin places too.

Revelations

Winter fest was fun. Warm, a bit above freezing, but cold enough to keep it wintery. Because of the recent warm weather the city went to where they had all the snow stacked that they had removed from the streets previous and placed it strategically on the main street as needed for the events. They hauled it all away, then hauled it back for the occasion.  Job security.

Our event was the snow sculpture competition. We had some friends who were recent additions to our tribe make the trip down from their mountain nest to help out. Being the local barber, I made the plan for a giant mustache with curved up ends. Our two families had a great time grooming the stack of snow into a reasonable facsimile of a handlebar mustache.

I had only recently moved to this small hamlet tucked deep in the gold filled mountains of Eastern Washington. I felt had become overwhelmed in our previous life on the coast. I had opened several businesses, managed a growing staff, and was busy building my status as a motivational speaker and trainer.  One day we just sort of bagged it all and moved to a small, dare I say minuscule, little town in the mountains.  Being away from the busy crowds and lifestyle of the coast had been refreshing. In fact, I felt better than I had in years.

This was the first time I had ever seen our little town busy. Where there were seldom more than a handful of folk walking the main drag at any given time.  I ha d a small shop on the street and spent days there doing my work in front of the big picture windows looking out and down the main drag in town.  Even at it’s busiest there were hardly more people out there than could fit in a large van.  Now there were a few hundred. As my wife, kids, and a friend walked the sidewalks looking at the booths I felt uncomfortable. At first it was a mild anxiety, but over the next fifteen minutes or so it grew into an inner rage that I was having to fight down. There were too many people. They were too close. They were close behind me, which was the worst of all. I began to panic.

The center of the blocked off street had only a few folk milling around and I escaped to there, breathing, almost panting with relief.  My wife looked at me a little funny but it didn’t look like a big deal so she went right back to enjoying the day. Inside, it was more than a big deal, it was huge!

We managed to enjoy all that Winterfest had to offer. We didn’t win with our gargantuan cookie duster, but we got a lot of encouraging comments. We went on to share a delightful dinner with our friends, family, and extended family, later that evening, but my response to the crowds left me questioning.

In the next couple of weeks I did some inner searching as well as some internet searching. It was then I discovered my secret, I had enochophobia. Enochophobia is what they call a fear of crowds.

Enochophobia made sense. I thought about my life, the things that made me think I was somehow abnormal and defective. I loved live music but I hated concerts. I loved faith teaching, but hated going to church. I could wait patiently for hours but I hated being in line. People, crowds of them, made me miserable.

Enochophobia. Enoch was an Old Testament fellow who had so much love for God that he never died. Enochophobia makes me die a thousand times over when I am around too many people.

I think I am a rare version of extroverted enochophobe. I really like, care for, even love folk. I love having people over for dinner, small groups, and jam sessions. The more there are, though, the more uncomfortable I become. There is a tipping point where my extroverted energy becomes overtaken with my crowd anxiety. Trouble is it changes from situation to situation.

It took me moving away from the crowds to realize those very crowds were a great cause of misery. I couldn’t be happy because I was almost always either uncomfortable or on the verge of it.  I am a little perturbed that I wasn’t aware before. Maybe I could have done something about it. Maybe counseling, acupuncture or electric shock therapy could have helped. My nature opened doors for me that my anxiety would never allow me to enter through, or if I did it would not allow me to remain.

Without really knowing why, I was given the cure, or at least the medication. At the urging of The Spirit I moved away from the crowds and the press. I was planted in a community stuck in the 1950’s. I was told to become faithfully rooted in this little hamlet where crowds are rare, community is common, and where love is the cure.

I don’t know if my mountainside medicating will ever cure my enochophobia.  I don’t even know at this point that I am interested in a cure.  Like I said, I feel better than I have in years.  I suppose the occasional crowd that springs up can be managed.  Maybe I can pray or ask for prayer.  Maybe I will just be, and enjoy being, and let things be as they are.  Maybe, just maybe, that little phobia was put there for a reason, to mold me, to make me, or even to send me.  Who knows, I may have just been born for such a time and such a place as this.

Present Time

We call our home the Love Well Homestead.  Sometimes I sort of put it together into one word.  Lovewell.  An internet search reveals many others who have adopted the same name.  It is ok.  I first heard the phrase, love well, from someone else too.

Point is that the name is also our mission.  We want to love well.  As Bob Goff says, everyone always.  That’s a pretty tall order.  We come to the table with all sorts of personal scars and phobias that stand contrary to the idea of loving well, everyone, all the time.  It is no easy task and we really aren’t nearly as good at it as it sounds, but we are getting closer, one silly milometer at a time.

Our home houses more than just our family.  We have both long term and short term guests who reside.  We also have a table that we invite others to join us around.  We are in a sort of way a reflection of the early Celtic monastery, which itself was a reflection of what we see in the Book of Acts.

Our hope, by loving well, everyone, always, is that our love reflects Christ’s love for us.  We hope that love will spread, maybe even infect a few folk.  Before long they will be loving well, everyone, always, and pretty soon everyone gets a generous helping at the table of love.

Meanwhile, every day we live our lives.  More often it is the mundane of survival.  Going to work, cleaning house, planting veggies (my wife is outdoing herself in this area) and learning how to relate in love to one another.  There are far more opportunities to not than there are to.  Living in close proximity is tough.

Since community is tougher the closer you get, we have a habit in this place at this point in history to keep our community loose and compartmentalized.  I mean we as a culture in general.  Closeness requires vulnerability.  We all have a few scars we can show that we earned by being vulnerable. Am I right?  Whew, some of them are quite deep.  The thing is that God started us out as a community.  The reflection of the God story in the Bible is about a community, a family, called out with the interesting task of blessing everyone, always.  That’s what He meant when he said to Abe that through him all the nations would be blessed. That is pretty much everyone.

We are living like this mostly because we were called to do so.  There is an old saying, God rarely calls the equipped, He equips who He calls.  That means we are learning as we go.  So much of the time we are making it up as we go.  Sort of like those early Irish monks did.  It really hacks the religious types.  The call is for us to love them to.  They are part of the everyone tribe.  Wow. See how tough this gets the deeper you go?

Love Well Homestead, our own little Celtic Monastery of sorts, lies just a few hundred yards from the intersection of Washington State Highways 20 and 21.  Do you need love?  Don’t we all, right? Well, we are trying our best to have some love to spare, and maybe a place at the table too.  Stop in, give a shout, or simply like this short message, and let us know about it.  Perhaps you will want to linger and be a part of our growing community of imperfect followers of Christ and  flawed practitioners of love.  This invitation is for everyone, always.

Back To Basics

I came to a point about a decade ago when I no longer had anything to lose.  I had already lost everything I previously thought I had.  The future was completely uncharted.  I jettisoned every vestige of my life previous.  I then began to carefully choose what belonged in my life and started to build a new one.

First thing that came was faith.  Not the old one, based upon the approval of others. This new one was between myself and my Savior. My faith no longer in religion, but in an ongoing love relationship with God and my fellow humans that manifested itself in reality.  It was love in action.

The next thing that came was family.  In place of doing what others told me was the right thing to do, I went the other direction and chose a wife, a baby, and in faith all that would follow. That included another baby.  Not babies now.  I also got a bonus son in the bargain.  I always wanted 4 kids.  Now I had them.  My oldest, my wife’s oldest, and over the next 5 years 2 of ours together.

I went a new direction in a career.  I went to school and found for the first time that I was actually a natural at something.  I went at it.  I became a little bit of a celebrity.   I had a ball doing it as well.  I owned multiple businesses and had a large network of influence.  It was exciting.

I shared it all.  Seriously, why would I want to keep this stuff to myself.  I shared my finances, my table, my home and my life with dozens of people who had no way of paying me back.  I even made a way for others to come alongside and join me in our business.  I taught and shared my secrets, not secrets. I smoothed out the path toward success for others.  That was a good thing, until it wasn’t

A few years back things seemed to change.  Where everything seemed to work, now things seemed to not work.  It didn’t shake my faith.  I just knew that I seemed to no longer be in sync with reality as it was unfolding.  Betrayals, thefts, and even a couple of attempts on my life made life a little more interesting that I would have preferred, but at least they make for great stories later, right?

My wife, children, and I took a bit of a sabbatical break.  It wasn’t dramatic.  It was actually quite small, but the biggest break I had taken in 8 years.  We left for a week, came back, and invested in looking around, listening, and feeling.

My wife and I rolled into a town we had never been in before, only heard about.  It was small.  Really small.  It was like taking a step back at least 50 years, maybe more.  We had lunch, coffee, and shopped on the main street in town.  Both of our imaginations were struck by this town.  Images of the town and country life dug into our hearts like a tic. We played with the idea and then we determined our path.  We would move.

A new location and a new lifestyle.  Of course we are still in the process, but it looks like we are going through.  Each day exposes new obstacles to following.  Hot on the heels of the impossible, the way though comes into view. Dramatic? No, but miraculous? Quite likely.  I think we may actually pull this thing off. OK, not just us.  Like I said, there seems to be some supernatural help here.

Where we are, we are motivated by faith, living  in at and enjoying it.  Actually, me not so much as I would like.  I enjoy for a while, but I worry.  I worry that I worry. Then I worry that my worry will cancel out my faith account.  It doesn’t work that way, but tell that to my worry.

I am getting better at not worrying. I am watching my wife closely. My wife is loving the journey.  She is looking for God’s providence everywhere, with the confidence of a child waking on Christmas morning and rushing to the tree.  She just knows Father has placed wonderful gifts for us to find at just the right time.  I admire her.  I am trying to be more like her. It is helping me not worry so much.

I always craved fame.  I craved success too.  Actually what I craved was acceptance and affirmation. It was all there!  I got to feel it and touch it, but didn’t much like the price tag it had on it.  Over time I began to see that it was ruining our emotional budget.  We almost went bankrupt in that area.  My heart, my wife’s heart, and my two youngest boys hearts needed a different type of reality.  We need to just be, not achieve, just be and do what is necessary. Work toward the simple goal of doing what needs to be done, not some chasing of the wind.

I still have in my heart a big vision tent.  I am, mostly, removing business, fame and influence from it.  I hate empty tents, so I am filling it up with love and acceptance, expressed through hospitality and faithful presence.  I am filling it with faith and faithfulness. So now instead of fame and success in a business sense I want to be famous and successful at being daddy to my boys, beloved by my wife, and a positive nudge toward Christ in my community. OK, not famous, but beloved. Not because of what I accomplished, but by how much I loved.

Bread Crumbs, Cookie Crumbs

When I wrote about our Jurassic Journey, I talked about following the crumbs.  Following the crumbs is the way my wife and I describe how we go through life.  We believe that the Holy Spirit leaves little trails of cookie crumbs for us to follow.  We enjoy the taste along the way and find some pretty neat places in the process.

We felt we were on a different crumb trail than the one that we had been on for quite a while.  Who knows, perhaps it was the same trail, just a different type of cookie.  We felt it when we began to plan for our first real breaking away, a vacation from our home network and our two businesses.  At first we thought we were going to look at an old motel we could have possibly purchased in the desert.  On the way there it didn’t feel like it, but it did before and it got us moving and solidified our resolve to explore.

We went along the trip, looking for those thin places where you could actually be in heaven and on earth at the same time.  We found a few and we found clarity in the lack of definition.  We were on a journey, not a trip.  A trip has a starting point, an apex point, and a return.  A journey leads you wherever, and the point is not in the points but in the serendipity of the path.  We didn’t get the motel.

If you have followed along on Facebook you will know that the last few months have been, interesting.

Usually I have visions.  They aren’t all inspired.  In fact most of them are not.  I like seeing them and running them to ground.  Often they are more ghost like, or like a mirage in the desert.  I am energized by them, nonetheless.

In our recent case, the reality is unfolding long before the vision.  Oh, my brain keeps trying to catch up.  Usually it is the other way around.  First you see the vision then you shape the reality.  Oh no! That would be too normal.  Right now it seems that we are seeing the reality and it is shaping the vision.  The reality is changing, and I mean changing really quickly.  The vision thing is just catching up.

I don’t really know what was going through the minds of the early Christ Followers.  You know, Jesus said all that stuff about going in all the world and to share this good news of God’s kingdom, then with a puff of smoke they saw him head up into the clouds.  Dramatic. What did they do?  They stayed in Jerusalem and shared the good news of God’s kingdom.  Half right.

When things got really tough in Jerusalem and the church was being persecuted, I kind of doubt they thought of that as a commissioning service. You know, the cool church thing where we pray for our missionaries and send them off with our blessings.  I think that reality happened.  It happened quick and the vision of the missionary call sort of caught up  with them along the way.

Long story, short version, within a few short weeks we visited a community in another part of the state, felt that we were supposed to become a part of that community, got financed for a house in that community and began packing.  Actually it only took 3 weeks.  In the mean time we are living, doing, and going about what we have been for almost a decade.

We carry with us some cool good news.  It is that the Kingdom of God is here!  Jesus grants us access to a great way of living, heavenly, you might say.  We also carry with us some stuff that we have learned about how we as a family do that best.  We do it best through hospitality, love, and acceptance.  How simple is that?

Our mission, in our current community or the one that we are moving to, is to create sustainable rhythms of hospitality that reflect the same love, acceptance and forgiveness that Christ offers us.  I’ve been trying this for a few years.  I have failed at it more times than I can count, but I am doing better.

I live my life out open.  If you happen to come close you will get to see me in all my un-glory.  I get some of it right, some of it not so much, but it is out there.  I put it out there because I am trying to be real.  I was good at a contrived version of who I thought I should be.  Too good, actually.  I don’t want to be anything other than what I am, each version an improvement on the last.

If you are interested, I would love for you to follow along.  If you aren’t, you can always follow along anyway just to do a guy a solid.  The more people who follow the better my blog looks and the more people who will follow.  OK, so that may be too much to ask.  Well, at least pray for me, ok?  I need the blessing and we all need the practice.

Eastern Washington

We were only back for a week.  Our time on vacation had stoked my longings for a little more elbow room to roam.  I turned my attention toward Eastern Washington.  I had not spent much time there, but it was hotter in the summer, colder in the winter, and a lot roomier than the area of Western Washington where we lived.

I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the western part of the state.  Land and home prices there were a fraction of what they are in the areas we have lived on the west side.  I had sent my wife link after link to so sites with houses and land near towns with names like, Tonasket, Wakunda, Republic and Kettle Falls.  I told her I would love to at least have some vacation land there.  Her reply was always an encouraging, “Look me up when you get back.”

Before our vacation to Colorado and Utah, we had begun to explore more of Washington than we had before.  It had been nearly 9 years since we had done any real adventuring.  We started by going to the Olympic Peninsula.  I had lived in Washington nearly 30 years and had never been to the rain forest.  My wife grew up here and she hadn’t either.  So we went.  It was great.  It was sort of the primer to our next trip. The long one.

After a day or two of resting up from our vacation in Colorado, I suggested that we continue to explore Washington by going to Winthrop and Republic.  These were both well known as old western type towns, set in the wide open of Eastern Washington along Hwy 20.  Hwy 20 was well known as a lovely drive through the high Cascades, and was also known for being closed half the year due to snowfall. Instead of her usually dismissal of all things eastern, my lovely bride agreed with an almost disturbing amount of enthusiasm.  What was going on here? Such a turn around from one known for being quite consistent can chill the blood.

Whether it was her unsuspected survival of the desert heat in Utah and Colorado, or something else, Angie was as interested in our trip east as I was. We both had the spirit of adventure coursing through our veins.  We also had this shared sense that we were still in the process of following some Divine cookie crumbs that were leading to somewhere we hadn’t even imagined.

The following weekend we headed east on Hwy 20 from our rental home on Whidbey Island.  We stopped in the town of Newhalem, just at the western base of the Cascade Mountain Range.  They had a small park with an old steam train engine in it.  It was amazing and refreshing that this engine was open to the public to climb on, in, and over.  All the levers and valves still moved and the bell could still be rung from the cab.  Rather than allowing the fear of liability to keep people away, the local government let the warmth of personal responsibility free people to touch and experience this rare artifact of a bygone age up close and personal.  The boys loved it.

The drive over the Cascades was breathtaking.  There were lakes and waterfalls everywhere.  One could easily see why the road was closed for much of the year.  There were steep sides and rock avalanches all along the roadway.  At one point there was a pull out on the side of the road littered with rocks and a few small boulders that had recently fallen from the hillside above the road.

The road wound down the steep mountain range into a valley much like the ones I had grown up in.  There was a bit of hazy smoke from wildfires in the Canadian wilderness, and a large firefighter camp on the side of the road.  The road ran along a swiftly flowing crystal clear river and into the town of Winthrop.  Winthrop is what everyone sees in their mind when they think of Old West.  The sidewalks were wooden and most of the buildings constructed back in the mid 1800s.  We had coffee and the boys had their lunch sitting on stools made from real horseback saddles.  Old west style.

We left Winthrop and went to the town of Omak, where we rented a motel room.  In Omak was an amazing western store. It was like a farm and ranch, tractor supply and sporting goods store all rolled into one giant supermarket of cowboy coolness. I am not a store person, or a shopper, but even I enjoyed being in there.

We drove over to Republic.  We only had a few hours to spend before we needed to head back west.  It was odd. It wasn’t as old westey as Winthrop, but it was definitely from the same mold.  The entire downtown was 1890s.  While hot and desert like the surrounding hills and up to the edge of town was thick with Ponderosa pines.  The highway went right through the center of town. It was wide with plenty of parking on each side.  Being Sunday, it was nearly deserted, which was a big change from the west side where everything is expected to be available 24 X 7.

Republic in the year 2018 reminded me of a town I had lived in growing up in the 1960s, called Rifle Colorado.  Rifle is now much bigger and quite modernized.  Republic, not so much.  Oddly I felt like I was coming home.  Everyone we met was friendly, welcoming, and very hospitable.

When we stopped to eat, Angie was using her phone and some local publications to see what house and land prices were like in the area.  I was excited to see her looking with great interest and joy at the seemingly affordable land prices.  While I still had a bit of a longing to own some land, I had felt the imperative for the last couple of years to buy a home.  While not quite ready to be put out to pasture, I am getting a little long in the tooth to be renting.  Social Security and my small pension would never be enough as a renter, but as home owners we could live quite comfortably if I got to the place where I couldn’t work.

We had been turned down in all of our recent attempts to get financing to buy a home.  I really didn’t want he to get her hopes up, but I was so very pleased that I wouldn’t be alone if one day I was able to acquire land east of the Cascades. It would take a miracle to be able to get a home, but it was a miracle that my Norwegian descended wife actually liked it here, 85 degrees and all.

Finding the Dinosaurs

It was an epic journey, in so many different ways.

When we finally escaped the gravitational pull that had kept us in orbit around our business for 8 years straight, we headed due east.  We pulled out of the driveway at 8 AM and I was so enraptured by the escape that I drove through the night while my family slept.

The sun came up over Idaho.  We stopped for a while to buy a pillow and seek out the mandatory Starbucks, then headed out with Utah in our sights.  We stopped in Ogden for lunch an

 

d saw a sign, “Dinosaur Park”. Well, we came to Utah to see dinosaurs. Not these, but some others. Since there was a sign and since we were already stopped, why not?

The Dinosaur Park in Ogden is on a winding drive up an attractive desert canyon.  While it was wasn’t exactly what we expected, it was pretty awesome.  Inside the building were exhibits and castings of fossils.  There were mineral and rock displays as well as animatronics.

Outside was a grassy, well treed park with life size replicas of the most well known dinosaur species.  We even fed Jurassic sized rainbow trout in the stream that led through the park.

That night, after checking into one hotel and promptly checking out (with some stressful moments in between) we ended up in Salt Lake City. We swam in the chilly indoor pool and I slept for the first time in 38 hours.

The next morning we ate breakfast at the hotel.  It was somewhat difficult to find food that Angie and I could eat, as we are committed to eating on the ketogenic plan.  I will write more about that in another blog.

We left Salt Lake and headed toward Vernal Utah and Dinosaur National Monument.  DNM is a location I had visited as a little boy and as a grown man. When I visited about 25 years ago it seemed like the first time I saw it as a wide eyed 7 year old.  I wanted to see if it held the same magic 51 years later and to see if my two youngest, 8 and 3, would feel like I did.  I was also very interested in seeing if my lovely bride, an avowed enemy of the desert heat, would enjoy it as well.

We headed into the mountains past Park City and the Olympic village.  I remember when I used to drive truck over that road and all that we there were a few fences and a scattered cow or two.  It was so impressive we had to stop and find some espresso there as well.

We got to Vernal in the early afternoon.  It was hot, but not desert hot.  Even the lovely Angie of The North seemed OK in the dry 86 degree heat.  I was surprised at the town.  Vernal was far larger than I remembered it to be, but it seemed that half of it was abandoned.  Being on a road that really leads nowhere of much importance to the masses, it was like many other towns we were to pass through and at the mercy and whim of a fickle energy industry.

When we got to the Monument it took my breath away.  Not just the magnitude of what it is, but that I saw my family stare in amazement at the stone cliff, littered with hundreds of dinosaur bones, fossilized and immortalized in stone for us to see.  Even Kian, only three years old, seemed to be transfixed in looking at the display before him.  Perhaps he didn’t fully understand what he was seeing, but it was like entering a massive cathedral for the first time.  The feeling that it is so much bigger than just its size is overwhelming as well as uplifting.

The visitor center, the building that protects visitors from the elements (as well as the bones, I imagine) had been rebuilt since I had last visited.  The new design allowed visitors to actually step up to the wall and lay hands upon the real fossilized remains of an animal that had died there 145 million years earlier.

Never, until this moment, had I ever experienced a first time feeling on second visit.  This was actually my 6th visit and each time, especially this last one, was as good or better than the first.

We spent the evening splashing in the pool at the hotel in Vernal.  We had dinner, a great steak and salad, in town and spent the night full of what we had experienced.  I am taking my kids back.  I  hope that they do the same.

The next day we drove into Colorado and over Douglas Pass.  Just outside of Rangely we saw a badger.  I never saw one outside of a zoo so we turned around and came back to see him again.  He looked a bit annoyed at that, bared his teeth, and took off into the bush at high speed.

We stopped at a lone Douglas fir, all adorned with Christmas ornaments, near the summit. We gathered some rocks for painting back home (see yondesea rocks on Facebook) and headed to Fruita Colorado.

9 years earlier, Angie and I had passed by the Dinosaur Museum in Fruita and had opted not to stop.  This time we took the boys and had a great time inside.  Most of the exhibits were cast, but inside you could see an actual lab where fossilized dinosaur remains, mostly from the Rabbit Valley dig, were being classified and labeled.  I think our little guys were so dino crazed that they ate it up.  It was a bit of a step down from the last two dino sites, but it was fun anyway.

For the rest of the day I took the family around the town of Grand Junction.  It was where I had spent most of my youth.  I took pictures of Cavan in front of the house we lived in as well as my Grandparents home.  We had dinner and spent the evening visiting with my highschool friend, Mike.

The next day was a bit tough.  I took the family for a drive over the Colorado National Monument.  Its a place a bit like the Grand Canyon on a much smaller, but in my opinion much more colorful scale.  Everyone was road weary and I don’t think anyone really enjoyed the trip.  That was too bad.

We spent a second night in Grand Junction, making full use of the swimming pool at the hotel.  It also gave us a second evening to spend with Mike.

The following morning we headed to Rifle Colorado.  I had lived there for a time when I was growing up as well.  We went to Rifle Falls and had an amazing time exploring the falls and the limestone caves.  As a side note, as a result of our ketogenic way of eating, my wife led us on a hike.  Not just a walk around the falls and pools, but up steep and winding trails leading to the top of the falls and around the rim of the canyon.  The boys were huffing and puffing, but Angie led out with the grace of mountain goat.

We reluctantly left Rifle Falls and headed north through Meeker and Craig, stopping for a while in Meeker at the old original Cavalry garrison which was now a museum.  I have never seen a more impressive collection of Americana and I got to sit with the boys inside the original Rifle to Meeker Stage Coach.

The rest of the trip back toward home was more of a chore than a joy.  There is a lot of nothing out there.  I was being renewed by the nothing, but the family was just tired of hours in the car.  We spent a night again in Vernal, then Next in Nampa Idaho, and then finally back home to Whidbey Island.

When we left, Angie and I had the feeling that we were actually being led by the Spirit.  We made no plans and set no agendas.  We just went. We came back feeling that simply going was all that was needed.  I felt renewed, somehow.  The wide expanses of desert and mountains, rocks and canyons, healed some raw spots on my soul.  The boys had a grand adventure and a few tokens to remember it by.  Angie and I felt even closer, if that were at all possible.  We somehow didn’t feel like the adventure was over, even though we were back.  All the joys and pains of owning a couple of barber shops, the intricate relationships, and the unpredictability of humankind reminded us we weren’t on vacation any more.  Even so, we both felt it.  We felt like the adventure wasn’t over.  Guess what.  It wasn’t!

A Jurassic Journey

I read in a book about early Celtic Christians that they didn’t separate their physical lives from their spiritual lives.  Making bread, doing laundry, cutting wood, plowing, these were all same to them as observing the sacraments, gathering for worship, or any other such associated thing.

Even before I read that particular book, I knew that was so descriptive of me.  I guess that why I was often called superstitious.  I thought that I saw the Divine hand and presence in most everything.  No, I don’t see God in a rock, but I see God all over how the rock became a rock, or even how it came to this place.  I don’t see a tree and think that it has a spirit (another Celtic distinctive, one I do not share), but I see The Spirit reflected all about how the tree came to be.

Without being too metaphysical, I think that I received a special message this morning.  Can I use the word, prophesy without sounding too kooky? It has the same to do with rocks and trees and stuff.  It was simply this,

the center of God’s will is not in your destination, it is in your journey.   

More specifically, my wife and I have had our joint imaginations tickled by the idea of going to a certain place and doing a certain thing.  This shared dream captured us and propelled us into some theoretical vision casting among ourselves and, quite frankly, we are enjoying it. We have done this before and we both get a lot of joy out of building oak sized ideas out of little acorn sized inspirations.  This one in particular is just the latest.

There are a lot of reasons for us not to go down this road of exploration, One is that it would take a miracle for us to financially make the idea come to pass.  The other that it would consume resources just to explore the idea, both of time and money. Of course there is also the effort involved in packing up two kids and taking a bonsai run across the west to look at something and test the waters and by all human standards the dream, the vision, the big picture will likely never come to be.

Angie and I like to call ourselves bread crumb Christians.  We follow the bread crumbs to wherever we feel we are being led.  In regards to this particular idea I told her we should follow the bread crumbs and see if this is God’s will.  This morning it hit me, the bread crumbs are God’s will.  It isn’t whether or not we buy this, sell that, or start the other thing.  It is the simple act of trusting enough that Kingdom purposes are accomplished simply but us following the crumbs and believing in enough for us for today.

So, with all the reasons that I have and I am going to come up with to not venture out, I am setting my mind to the task, and I am determined that in a little over a week and a half I am setting out with my family gathered around.  We are going to go see where the dinosaurs once roamed, and maybe even look at an old motel, too run down for the current owner to want to keep.  Maybe we can help with that.  But, the blessing for us and others is in the journey.

Wish us luck.

Hope and a Haircut

via Hope and a Haircut

Hope and a Haircut

Calling 5,000 stylists, barbers, and others who want to save lives!

(hopeandahaircut@gmail.com)

This is a wonderful world.  This is also an amazing time in history in which to live.  The things that we have been able to witness boggles the mind.  In my 5 decades I have seen the rise of sci-fi television, the surpassing of sci-fi in real life (think cell phones).  I have seen spaceships fly and sadly, fall from the sky. Computers are now such a part of our lives that it is unimaginable that we could have survived without them.

With all the wonder that we are surrounded by, it is a sad truth that all is not wonderful in the world.  Everyone carries some, many carry more, and some carry an overwhelming burden. That burden can sometimes block out any view of the future.  It blocks the view of hope, and hope is not optional.

Hope is simply the strong desire of some future event. We all have it, or at least most of us. It animates us, invigorates us, and it empowers us.

Inspiring hope is something that comes easy to me. Being a barber makes it even easier, most days.  I didn’t really think about it until recently. When I first started out, when my haircuts were not so amazing, I was still quite good at reminding my customers of their hope before sending them out the door. When the cut wasn’t all either of us were wanting, it is what kept them coming back.

Hope is not a given.  Sometimes people lose their hope, even their ability to hope.  Without hope, it is a pretty harsh world out there. I mean face it, for whatever the reason, there are some awfully mean folk out there that make life even harder than it normally would be.  Sometimes it is because they have lost hope as well, or so I imagine.

Did you know that in America there are an average of 133 people each day who have lost their ability to hope to the point that they take their own lives?  66 of them are veterans of our military.  That is pretty heavy stuff. The real heavy part is that most of those left behind say, “we had no idea”. It’s not like people wear a sign around their neck that says, Lost All Hope.  

  I get it, it’s a big country with a lot of people and those numbers may not seem significant in the big picture, but when you look at the numbers of living people who are affected, most for the rest of their lives, the numbers become staggering.

A few weeks ago we came up with the idea of Hope and a Haircut.  Inspired by a similar program ongoing in the United Kingdom, where suicide is the number 1 killer of young men, we have been exploring ways in which we can make a difference, even save a life.

While we are still fleshing out the responsive part of Hope And A Haircut, we already know the best proactive approach is to remind people of the hope that they have, or had.  Instead of those mean, reactive people, we can major on kindness that may translate into the warmth of hope being rekindled.  We are looking to identify 5,000 beauty industry professionals who are interesting in intentionally sowing hope in the hearts of those who sit in our chairs.

In most every state, barbers and cosmetologist are required to take blood-borne pathogen training. The premise behind preventing the transfer of blood-borne pathogens is to assume that everyone is a potential carrier.  You can’t always tell by looking at someone if they are a carrier or not.

Most people who take their own lives never let on that they have lost their hope.  We want to encourage everyone we come in contact with, especially those in our industry, to assume that everyone we meet or serve is potentially a carrier of a terminal loss of hope.  

Truth is that though it seems like an easy sell, it is not.  It is easy to get people on board with something that shows a result or some sort of progress. That is the payoff.  Problem is that in most every case, we will never know if in fact we have been instrumental in the saving of a life.  That does not make it any less important, but it does make a long term commitment to inspiring hope a little harder to make happen.