No Grown-ups Allowed!

This post is a bit of a break from our usual fare, for a couple of reasons. One is that it has nothing to do with our farm. The other is that it is really more of a meditation or insight that arose out of the event.

While on vacation two weeks ago in Tennessee, we had the opportunity to take on a special project for my mom, who lives with my sister. The house is built into a hill, so that the front porch and the north side porch are at the top of the hill, but the basement entrance where the cars are parked are at the bottom of the fall. The slope was a good 6 feet of fall over 34 feet of run, all grass, which gets very slippery when it rains.

I decided to mark, measure, dig and set forms for a sidewalk with steps, expecting not to get much farther than that, leaving the gravel, compacting and pouring to my brother Matthew to manage after we left.

As it turned out, the project gained some momentum. By the simple expedient of digging non-stop for about 8 hours, and then another two hours the next day before sunrise, I managed to move 5 yards of clay by wheelbarrow out of its original home, into its (temporary) new home in the hedgerow across the road. Then I started putting forms together, and Grandma got excited and ordered a load of gravel.

This was a very popular move among the younger kids.

By the way, nothing affords these kids greater entertainment than a pile. Be it a pile of gravel, a pile of sand, a pile of leaves, woodchips, snow or dirt, no sooner has the dump truck pulled out of the drive (no sooner because wiser heads and hands hold onto them tightly by the arms) than they run to scale it at full speed.

Winnie, being a big girl now, is not the least bit backward in coming forward.

A few hours and 6 or 8 wheelbarrow loads later their pile had drastically decreased in size.

As we were finishing forms, and pouring, spreading, pounding the gravel base layer (under a time crunch because the cement truck had been ordered and was due to arrive at 11) I came down to get more cement and Seppi informed me, “You are breaking our tunnel! No drown-ups allowed, Dada!”

He and Ellie had dug a tunnel (really a valley) through the top of the mountain that was the way to the castle they were going to build. Therefore, I could not take any more of their gravel.

Alas, as the man said, the show must go on. I took more of their gravel. Their valley collapsed. They were sad.

Then the cement truck arrived.

And that was so exciting they forgot all about the gravel pile. Also, the grownups confined them to the porch so they couldn’t get on the gravel pile.

The rest of the project went more or less as planned, a scramble to get the cement poured and then smoothed to an acceptable (though obviously amateur) level before it set in the warm sun.

The two big girls even got to try their hand at leveling cement on the excess pour at the bottom of the walk. They did a mostly tolerable job that I was able to top off to pretty good in about 5 or 10 minutes, which is very respectable for a first time, especially when you consider their size and strength, the weight of the tools and the weight of the cement.

The rest of the walk was about two hours of bent-over work, often balancing on 2×8’s extended across the wet pour, but we got it done.

During prayer time after we got back home, I forget what we were talking about, but I mentioned this event to Jesus or He brought it up to me, and I laughed over Seppi’s “No grown-ups allowed.” Then Jesus replied, smiling quietly, it seemed to me, “Isn’t that how you act towards me?”

He is right of course. He is building something big and beautiful, and I am too small, too distracted, too shortsighted and too weak to see it or really be able to do anything useful to move it forward. That’s fine. He doesn’t need me to.

However, because He loves me He invites me onto His work site, gives me some child-sized tools to work with and says, “Do what I do. Work over here, dig this, don’t work over there because it is too dangerous. Lift this, it is your size. Don’t lift that, it’s too heavy.” He adjusts His expectations to my appetite for it. On days when I am focused and will to listen, He lets me work right beside Him putting my little shovel-loads in a little wheelbarrow right next to His. On days when my attention span is short and weak, He still lets me scrabble around in a gravel pile.

Then He comes to take some of my gravel away and I tell Him, “You are ruining my tunnel! No Jesus allowed!”

And because He is merciful, He just laughs at me and takes the gravel anyway.