privileges

All in one week, here are some of the amazing things I got to do:

-help plan a wedding reception
-hold a newborn babe the day of her birth
-snuggle two kiddos with two temperatures on two couches ( they are both feeling better!)
-sell goat cheese at the Farmer's Market
-harvest basket after basket of fresh vegetables from my own garden
-run errands with #1 Daughter
-talk to #1 Son (who is in Uganda!) on the phone with crystal-clear reception
-share a late-night snack on the candle-lit porch with my Hubby
-talk about God with numerous people who encouraged my soul to the core
-paint trim in the new church plant in a nearby town (while visiting with a dear friend who was also holding a paintbrush!)
-make pickles
-make bread
-make jokes
-drift on the river in my little green kayak while the seagulls were dipping in the setting sun.

So, how was your week?

getting the story

He is in Northern Uganda, a place not known for its kindnesses.

His travel-partner is in the village clinic. Maybe malaria, maybe typhoid. Let's wait & see. This unforseen predicament leaves him with one other to guide him, a Ugandan from the south. A friend.

He hikes dirt trails to remote villages; the people there, they do not talk much. War has crafted them into closed books; tightly-wrapped packets of hurt & fear. Their dark eyes snap shut when he reaches for them with his own.

He cannot ask them their stories, not yet.

He carries water along with them. From the muddy holes in the cracked earth, in plastic buckets, dented pails, rusted bowls to their mud huts.

He keeps his camera back in the hotel room out of respect, although soon he brings it forth because how else can he tell what he has seen?

The time is short & he knows too well that trust comes long; trust stretches out slow; it bends in the heat. It can distort his good intent, his will to tell their story.

On the roof of an abandoned building, boys leap in the dying streaks of day. They seem to reach for something just outside their grasp. Lunging & snatching, it eludes them. And now another day in Northern Uganda is done.

Are we closer to the goal?

on the water at dusk

I took to the river last night.

A blue heron met me there. Also, two boats of quiet fishermen who understood that I didn't want to break the river-silence by greeting them across the water. Not last night, no.

One drowsy fishing-line after another gracefully launched into the air, spanning the chasm between sky & surface before landing light as a ballerina.

A ream of crickets primed the air with their low music, and over the marshland a combine chewed late-summer's hay in a distant field.

A mink emerged from the weedy bank and whistled into his burrow as sleek as water poured into a cup. He left one winking leaf bobbing in his wake.

I wish you were with me out on the water tonight, because you would been quiet; you would have understood.