Yet Another Handful of Grain

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20253 Comments

Dear Will:

I’m prepping for another backpacking trip with my daughter, and as I always do I have pulled out a shake-down list I solicited years ago from my friend Warren, who is singularly responsible for my willingness to attempt these crazy adventures in the first place. The checklist is full of the obvious and not-so-obvious (which is why I mooched it to begin with). But there at the top—before he gets to mole skin and duct tape and paracord—Warren includes the following note: “Just remember the lesson we learned: No more than one pass a day!”

Ah yes, that fateful day coming back from Mt. Whitney when we decided to go over Guyot Pass (10,900 feet), down to Rock Creek (9,820), and then to the meadow (11,060) midway to Cottonwood Pass where we expected to set up our tents for the night. As we approached the meadow, everyone in our group agreed that we could go no further. We counted our steps, wondering how much trail remained. Time dragged. So did our feet. At last we reached the open pasture, gassed and parched and ready to flop down in exhaustion. That is, until we were informed that the springs at the meadow had all run dry. The nearest water, in fact, was another four miles up the trail at Chicken Spring Lake.

What a punch in the empty gut. Yet there was nothing to be done but moan, hoist our packs, and begin again. We had already determined that we could go no further . . . until we had to. Dehydrated and calorie-starved, we somehow made our way to Chicken Spring Lake after dark, and by the light of our headlamps we filtered our water, cooked our food, set up our tents, and collapsed into our sleeping bags, swearing (as previously noted) to never do that again. 

Perhaps you’ve been there yourself. Not at Chicken Spring Lake, per se, but metaphorically for sure—someplace near the point where you are certain you can do no more. Maybe in the midst of an overbooked, hyper-stressful schedule one of your children lets you know that her marriage is starting to fray. Or you have one of those phone calls with an aging parent that makes it clear that he is really starting to slip. Maybe you get hit with one of those unexpected expenses that you have no way of paying. Meanwhile, you still have to do the everydays: make the meals, help with the homework, fix the broken sprinkler, prepare to teach your Sunday School class. Everywhere you turn you are expected to do more, give more, be more, and at some point you feel that you no longer have it in you.

And right about then, when you feel you have given all you have and even a bit more, at church they ask you to take on a new assignment, or you get laid off at work, or your closest friend comes to you in tears asking you to lift her burden. And it’s all so overwhelming that just about all you can manage is that popular, one-word prayer: “HELP!”

And yet somehow, in that moment, you find a way. You know just what to say to your troubled friend. Perhaps you remember a verse of scripture, and although you don’t know where it is or exactly how it goes it is nonetheless just the right thing for her at just the right time. In that instant you find “strength beyond your own” to enable you to go one more day, or one more hour, or one more step, and maybe carry someone else with you as you go.

At times like this, I often think of the poor widow who lived with her son in the town of Zarapheth. She faced poverty made worse by drought which led to famine. She had done all she could to care for her son, but when the food finally ran out, so did her hope. Knowing she had just enough meal in the barrel and oil in the cruse to make one last cake for her and her son, she headed out one sad morning to gather sticks to build a fire to cook what she believed would be their last supper. She had done all she could and had nothing left to give.

But then—of course—she was asked to do one thing more. A stranger stopped and asked her to fetch him some water and bread. When she explained her tragic circumstances, he gave a stupefying response. “Make me first a cake,” he said, “and then make a cake for you and your son. Do this and the meal in your barrel and oil in your cruse will never run out.” Which she did. And the stranger, Elijah the prophet, made good on the miraculous promise.

When asked to do something especially hard, this widow did so in faith, and God blessed her for it. I love this story because I see in it a promise to us as well: That if we can hold onto our faith in the midst of difficult times—rather than curse God for our misfortune—perhaps we may lay up in store for a future moment in which all we have to give is still not enough. My faith and personal experience tell me that such efforts invite compensatory blessings that will be made available when we need them most.

It won’t be because we have lived such good lives that somehow we have earned it—not strictly anyway. But it may be a merciful nod toward our faithful efforts to give “such as we had” at some point in the past. And because of our faith and our willingness to do hard things when things got hard, it will be as if we reached into our empty barrel and found yet another handful of grain. We will tip our empty cruse and somehow oil will once again come trickling out. And when that miracle happens—and it will—we will feel the love of God, perhaps like we never have before. We will know that He sees us, He knows us, He loves us, and He has once again fulfilled His promise that we will never walk alone.

I don’t know exactly how this works. But it does. And it always will. 

PW

P.S. Bryn and I will be hiking past Chicken Spring Lake on Tuesday. I’m thinking perhaps we should stop for water.

Photo by Pilz8 on SummitPost.org

We Love Those Who Love Those We Love

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20251 Comment

Dear Will:

A couple of weeks ago Dana and I were in Logan, Utah, seated in a well-appointed lecture hall on the campus of Utah State University, there to hear Bryn defend her Master’s thesis: “Once Our Land Is Gone, It’s Gone”: Farmer Perspectives on Growth, Embeddedness, and the Future of Food in the Great Salt Lake Basin. Scattered about the room were the folks I had expected: fellow students, advisers, various other members of the academic community—even a couple of the farmers who had been featured in her research. 

Dana and I were brought to tears as we heard Bryn’s persuasive narrative about the plight of the local growers who are too often scapegoated for the desiccation of the Great Salt Lake. As Bryn’s research demonstrated, they are passionate men and women whose love of the land and of their craft cannot be doubted, people who—in spite of the forces working against them (climate change, urban sprawl, misplaced political priorities)—continue to find ways to bring food to our tables year after year after year. Had you heard Bryn’s presentation or read her thesis, you too would have come away convinced that the farmers of the Basin deserve our respect and admiration rather than the underappreciation and even vilification that dominates the discourse around Utah’s growing water crisis.

Our emotions that day ran high—and not merely due to Bryn’s moving account. There were others in the hall that day who also moved us to tears. There in the center, about halfway back, was an unexpected quartet, three aunts and an uncle, members of an extensive (and growing) Bryn Fan Club who had driven a couple of hours each way to be there to witness Bryn’s big moment. On the Zoom link were additional members of the BFC, including another aunt, a former teacher, and one of our dearest friends whose avuncular charm has made him one of Bryn’s dear friends now as well. As we watched them watch her, we felt a great outpouring of affection for each of them. None of them are farmers, nor do they have a longstanding interest in the agriculture of the Great Salt Lake Basin. Yet there they were because they love Bryn—and Dana and I felt it deep down. That day we were reminded of something we have noted over and over throughout the years as others have taken interest in our children: We love those who love those we love. 

The week prior, in a totally different place for a totally different reason, we felt similar pangs of tenderness and appreciation. We had gathered in a local park to celebrate our granddaughter’s second birthday. But for a couple of other toddlers, the only other non-grandparents at the party were friends of my son Luke and his wife: delightful, irresistible thirty-somethings who had gathered outside a small zoo on a Saturday afternoon to show love and support to three of the people we love most in the universe. Our granddaughter will remember nothing from that day, but the image of Luke’s friends, doting on my favorite little two-year-old, fills me with wonder and gratitude I cannot fully express.

These emotions were swirling in my breast this past week as I hiked one of our local trails. Along my trek I passed a man who kept calling out: “Kylie girl! Who’s a good girl? Kylie!” He explained that some friends had lost their dog in the area and that he was spending his Saturday trying to reunite them. Immediately I found myself loving both the man and the dog and hoping that by some means I might find Kylie myself.

That’s how this stuff works: Love is infectious in all the right ways. Aunts love nieces; parents love aunts; friends love friends and their dogs, and somehow strangers end up loving them too. So when your daughter loves farmers, there’s only one thing to do: You cut your hike short and give in to her longstanding admonition to support the local farmers’ market. The berries, avocados, carrots, and cucumbers you purchase there will almost be beside the point. You go there to bear witness and give thanks. To acknowledge labor and craft and caring, to honor and respect. And in your own small way to express your love for those she loves as well.

PW

P.S. They found Kylie. Don’t you just love that?

Photo by Shelley Pauls on Unsplash

The Children Are Watching

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20251 Comment

Dear Will:

For as long as I can remember, my dad was a member of the Rotary Club. He went to meetings and on the occasional trip, but mostly I had no idea what it meant to be a Rotarian except for a sign that hung on the wall of his office listing the organization’s Four-Way Test. To this day every Rotary Club around the world recites it like a catechism:

Of the things we think, say or do

  • Is it the TRUTH?
  • Is it FAIR to all concerned?
  • Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
  • Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

You didn’t have to see that sign on his wall to know my dad was an honorable man. It showed up in everything he did and was reflected in the respect he commanded both in business and in his private life. He didn’t talk much about his affiliation with the Rotary Club, but if you knew him and later learned he was a Rotarian, you would not have been surprised.

My dad’s sense of honor showed up all the time. I remember once all nine of us had piled back into the family station wagon following dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Somehow my dad realized that he had not been charged the full amount for our meal or he had received too much change or something like that. Well, he left us all in the car and marched back into the restaurant to settle his account properly. I was amazed. We had already left. No one would ever know. But for my dad, these things mattered. 

Tad R. Callister has said: “Integrity is a purity of mind and heart that knows no deception, no excuses, no rationalization, nor any coloring of the facts. It is an absolute honesty with one’s self, with God, and with our fellowman. Even if God blinked or looked the other way for a moment, it would be choosing the right—not merely because God desires it but because our character demands it.”

Throughout the ages, our most admired leaders have been men and women similarly committed to a life of virtue. George Washington famously walked away from the presidency when fawning admirers were anxious to install him as king. He chose instead (and once again) to put the interests of his country ahead of his own. (No wonder we all found it so easy to believe the apocryphal story of young George and the cherry tree.) Of Washington, Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “His integrity was pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known. . . . He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.”

Nor should we forget that our greatest president of all, Abraham Lincoln, has always been known as Honest Abe—a remarkable honorific, especially considering how little evidence of honesty remains in political circles today. The Lincoln Heritage Museum has called Lincoln “an exemplar and a model of virtue perhaps more than any person in world history other than religious figures.”

It is in no small part due to the character of such men and women that the United States has risen to greatness from its humble beginnings. Like any nation ours has an imperfect past, of course, but if we have ever been great and ever hope to be so again, it has been and will be due to those moments when we have stood tall and done the right thing, even in difficult circumstances. When we have put the broad interests of the many ahead of the selfish interests of the few. When we have made sacrifices for humanity and given of our riches and resources to lift those less fortunate.

This is who we are—or who we were, in any case. And who we should be. So let us not be too casual nor too forgiving as we watch those now in power openly violate their solemn oaths of office; as they act to do away with those appointed to enforce ethical standards and flag conflicts of interest within the government; as they instruct others to ignore laws against bribery. As they disregard commitments, betray friendships and alliances, cozy up to the sorts of strongmen and dictators that for years we have fought to constrain and overcome. Nor should we make excuses for behavior and policies that our forebears found abhorrent and worked so hard to eliminate in the United States of America.

I’m not saying we should elect only Rotarians; but it seems obvious to me that we should not lend our support to those whose lives make it clear that they could never get in the club. In any case, before we drive away, we must all remember that there are children in the backseat watching what we do next.

PW

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash