A Valentine Legacy

The Lord graciously blessed me with parents who love each other.  They have loved each other for many, many Valentine's Days.  True fidelity.  That is an old fashioned word, but one of my favorite words.   It means loyalty, faithfulness in a relationship, constancy, steadfastness, and true-heartedness.  For 46 years my parents have acted out fidelity.  My sisters and I had a living, breathing marriage tutorial right before our very eyes.  I have watched and learned.  Not that their relationship (or mine) is perfect.  But I have seen them seek to honor God and each other as they walk through this crazy thing we call life.  See how young and in love they were oh, so long ago.

Thanks Mom and Dad for loving each other - and me! 

And while I am thinking on it, I never got to see my grandparents together.  My grandfather died way too young.  But I have heard stories!  I like to think that my parents also had a great example to observe as well.  Check this photo out!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Thoughts on paradise

Yesterday I picked the last few ripe tomatoes of the season. Tomorrow I will bring in the last of the peppers. While doing this I have been thinking about paradise. Not what we picture as heaven, but what was created in the beginning... the Garden of Eden. I have always imagined it in all its beauty. According to Merriam-Webster, paradise literally means an enclosed park. Reading Wendell Berry this week left me with a new sense of Eden. My thoughts on this paradise are slowly changing. Maybe it was beautiful because it was separated from the rest of creation - separated from something outside. Consider this poem:

Enclosing the field within bounds
sets it apart from the boundless
of which it was, and is, a part,
and places it within care.
The bounds of the field bind
the mind to it. A bride
adorned, the field now wears
the green veil of a season's
abounding. Open the gate!
Open it wide, that time
and hunger may come in.
(from A Timbered Choir)

Maybe Eden was perfectly beautiful not because the whole world was new and unspoiled, but because it was separated from the whole world and cared for by Adam and Eve. It was fenced off from the rest (at least I have always assumed this because they were put out of the garden and there was a gate.) A farmer looks at his field and loves it for what it is, but also for what he has made it to be. God separated Eden from the unbounded world and created a caretaker to cultivate it. Did God help Adam to dream of what it would become as two farmers surveying their land? Did God show Adam how to sow the seeds that would grow into produce that would adorn his fields? My father walks his land and plans and cares and tends it. It is beautiful. And it is surrounded by wildness. The wildness is beautiful, but not tended, not cared for. My father's land is full of wonderful bounty. His gate does open and begs my family to come and eat. Was Eden a place for Adam and Eve to come and satisfy themselves? So often I think of Adam as a herdsmen or zoo-keeper, not a farmer. But his garden was paradise. He was enclosed in something set apart for him. Now we have a small, weed filled glimpse of what he had. I look forward to the day when God will open wide the gate and say "Come. Eat. Be set apart forever with the Lamb that was slain. There will be no more hunger or thirst." Or weeds!