But the forest has encroached on the house over the years.
As we look at our big renovation project, the first thing we have to address is the trees that are rooting at the foundations and branching into the Shingles of the house.
On windy nights the branches of one of the maples actually scratch against my window like the scritching of nails in a horror film.
Today is the day! The tree guys are coming!
The work started around 7:30 A.M.
Mom needed lots of reassurance as the men worked outside her window. It sort of let me know what we will be looking at as we head into the house construction.
It seems strange being able to see every corner of the house.
Now to the trimming and cleaning work! The yard around the house will look a lot better when the contractors come to set up their staging for the siding work.
7:20 A.M. Get mom her breakfast and medications/ Make coffee for household/ Vacuum/ move clothes drying racks/ make beds/ sweep kitchen/ clean bathrooms/ move broken pallets from stone porch to burning pile/ Gather trash for dump run/ light candles to fragrance house (I love fragrance)
9:30 A.M. Meet with contractors and sub contractors to begin getting Nitty Gritty Reality framework into place. Here is where the dream begins to take on earthly shape and all the warts and pimples begin to show. I think this stage of a project is the part that needs the most faith.
BUT THIS SPACE BETWEEN THE DREAMING AND THE JOURNEY IS THE PLACE WHERE MOST OF MY PLANS COME TO NOTHING. THE “WE’LL SEES” AND “WHAT IFS” BEGIN TO TAKE THEIR TOLL AS MAYBES BECOME NITTY GRITTY REALITIES.
For instance we discovered….Not just new shingles. We will need new windows.
And…Yep…. This old house will need some new electrics.
And before we can even think of beginning the trees must go.
We will have appointments this week with the plumber and the gutter people and get their thoughts on the job.
For me faith in this part of the project is the part that just keeps going, just keeps organizing. This is the part where I just keep telling myself it will be all right and we will handle whatever comes our way and make whatever modifications we have to to get the project done. This is the part where I guard my prayer time. It is in this season I most appreciate the place of quieting the soul.
NITTY GRITTY REALITY FAITH LOOKS LIKE…
11:00 A.M. Dump run and then reviewing the appraisal for the house. Send it off marked “done” to the bank
12:00 P.M. Lunch for me and Mom. Brenda is off to deal with the fact that her furniture in The Netherlands is all gone. Her old landlord decided to remodel and just chucked all her stuff!
1:00 P.M. Contact one of my old students about the trees (he runs a landscaping and tree service)/ Contact our insurance company to get information the bank needs sent off/ cancel haircut …it just ain’t happening/ send e-mail to personal assistant about a ministry event coming up that we need to coordinate/ field phone calls and messages from church members.
2:00 P.M. Prayer break…I really need to center down
Today two things happened to me in prayer. As I sat for my afternoon devotions on the porch (which generally last at least an hour) I was listening to my meditation music, and around the corner of the steps came a gopher.
He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“Hello!” I said….and he was off like a shot.
It makes me happy that nature lives at my front door.
The second event happened around 6:30 P.M. as I was having my evening devotions. I was listening to the book of 1 Corinthians on my phone. The birds and the squirrels were gathered at the feeder eating supper.
Eight or ten doves and several squirrels and a chipmunk were happily munching at the birdseed. Then, they were off like a shot. The rodents skittered into the underbrush and the doves took to the skies in different directions.
The hawk was barely more than a shadow and an explosion of feathers as it grabbed the mourning dove from its flight. It was over leaving only a rain of dove down falling into the sumac below.
Life has been a mix of gopher gladness and great hawk gasps lately.
Brenda got the keys to her new apartment in Zaandam yesterday.
She needed a new laptop. So we prayed and less than two hours later she was on her way to get a new laptop provided by one of her donors.
Then she got a call from her landlord saying that all her furniture had been destroyed by an air B-n-B customer (she had consented to leave her furniture in the apartment if her landlord would hold the apartment for her when she returned).
Gophers or great hawks, you never can tell what’s coming across the porch on any given day. The only assurance is that both will show up at one time or another. Sometimes they will even show up at the same time.
In my experience though God has this singular talent to turn our sorrows into dancing, our gasps into gladness and our great hawks into gophers.
How about you are living in the shadow of great hawks right now or are you playing with the gophers?
The older I get the more I realize that life, to be truly tasted and enjoyed needs to be taken in small bites.
There is a temptation to lose the beauty of the single flower because I am trying to conquer the whole forest.
When I give into that temptation, and start to think about the miles I have to go before I sleep for the night, instead of the inch I have left to walk before I can rest for a minute, I find myself getting filled with stress and striving. In that negative mindspace I find myself constantly disappointed by my own inability to meet my self imposed demands and by the world which falls so short of my expectations.
Take the Vicarage project for instance.
When I look at the project as a whole, and think of all that needs to be done, and think of all the money its going to cost, and consider all the possible problems which are going to rise between now and the time I pay the final installment of the loan we are taking out to pay for it all well….
But life isn’t meant to be lived in all those miles at once. It is meant to be lived in the inch we are on right now, because honestly that is all we can deal with…right now.
More than that it is meant to be a celebration of this inch. Not a worry about what the next inch will bring. What can I find to be thankful for in the moment….
I am thankful that all of our bank paperwork has now been received.
Something bad kept happening when I tried to send it, but our friendly neighborhood banker Deb took care of it for me this morning. Yay!
More than that though Brenda has found a new home base for her work in The Netherlands. She was told just over a month ago she would have to move from her current BOO (Base of operations) becacuse the owner is selling it.
That news created a few tough inches. It is not easy finding an apartment when there is an ocean between you and a site visit. But thanks to some very dedicated ministry partners and a good recommendation from her old landlord, Brenda just signed paperwork on a new two bedroom house.
Further she has sensed the leading of the Lord that she will be back in the Netherlands by the end of August or the first week of September!
Life is full and fast now, but living by inches is how I am keeping my peace.
I called the bank today because we were supposed to get an e-mail confirming the submission of our HELOC application. We did not. Our banker, Deb, is checking on things, and I am in the waiting space.
Not that there is nothing to do in the waiting. Life doesn’t wait for the waiting spaces and even in them there are deadlines to be met as we continue to walk by faith toward our upcoming renovation. Besides the day to day stuff, we have a lot of projects to do before the renovation itself begins. I still have to chop out the rest of the bushes around the stone porch. I am leaving the hundred year old antique hydrangea though. It’s so beautiful and if we can help it I really don’t want to lose it.
Our forest garden is so beautiful this year….and the fragrance! I wish I could bottle it and save it for winter.
I mowed this morning and pulled some more of the gardens away from the house. The yard is full of herbs in the afternoon heat.
For the rest of the day I will work on the gardens to prepare them for the stone porch renovation. I am taking this slight delay as God’s way of blessing me to give me time to get all the work done by schedule.
Everyone who knows me knows I love my little forest garden in the center of town. I love the wild look and as we do this renovation to house and property I want to keep it. But even I realize the yard has gotten severely out of control. Our prospective contractors, some of my congregants and even a few of my dear blogging friends have encouraged me to get the forest away from the house.
Most of the work that has to be done at the Vicarage I can’t do….but this I can. So the pruning begins here.
And here
And here.
And here.
had to do this pruning in three stages. The bush honey suckle was easy enough to tackle but the heat of the afternoon sun chased me indoors.
Once the sun was a little lower on the horizon I got back at it. This Barbary thorn bush was mixed in with a bridal wreath and a tiny juniper bush.
The Barbary thorn bush was so thorny I couldn’t drag it like I did the honey suckle. A tarp and a garden rake made the job doable.
Evidently I have some burning to do.
I have some roots to dig, but at least I can get at them now.
So much is changing in Vicarage life.There’s: my new role as lead pastor, Amanda’s new role as youth and next generation pastor, Brenda’s work with this new missions sending agency A.C.T., The vicarage facelift….and my son-in-law, daughter and granddaughters are moving back to WInchendon!
Melanie and Abigail in the new apartment.
Yesterday a team of us braved the July 4th traffic to pack up the apartment in Lynn and drive all their furniture back to WInchendon. We finished up about 10 P.M. last night…..
And restarted at about 9 A.M. this morning.
Breakfast and a moveJodyThe moving crew
Thank you to everyone from our Cornerstone family who made this move happen! Amanda, Art, Kaden, Ray, Christian,Dan, Jim, Toni (James’ parents from CT) Juan James, Melanie (so nice to have you and the girls in Winchendon). Curt, Tyler, Ken, Betty, Brenda, Jody,Ezra and Josh (our visiting missionaries from Rotterdam) and Pastor David and Emily (pastors from East Coast International who helped us in Lynn.
It has been a looooong time since I posted on Notes.
Originally this blog was created to highlight the lifestyle of our little Vicarage family. My other blog was going to be reserved for arts and Christian thought.
There has been so much water under the bridge since Notes began I haven’t really known how to find an on ramp back onto this highway……But now an on ramp has been provided in our new project here at the Vicarage.
Since last I wrote here, I have become the lead Pastor of Cornerstone Church. Amanda has become the youth and children’s pastor at Cornerstone. Brenda has changed missions sending agencies and is now moving forward with an artist’s/ missions group (more on that later).Mom has had a major fall, lost the ability to walk and has recovered and all the animals have gotten older and…….The Vicarage has begun talks about some major plastic surgery.
The Vicarage was built in 1901. It has aged into a stately old home surrounded by a lush forest garden.
SOME NE STONE WORK IS IN ORDER. DO YOU THINK I SHOULD LET THE FOREST GARDEN LIVE ON THE STONE PORCH?GUTTER WORK GREATLY NEEDED!
But 50 years of neglect has left the old place in great need of repair. My new job is an answer to some financial prayers I have been praying for a few years. SO TODAY BRENDA AND I MET WITH OUR HOME REMODELERS TO DISCUSS THE SCOPE OF WORK AND THE COST. NEXT WEEK WE MEET WITH THE BANK FOR FINANCING AND SO NOW YOU SEE THE ON RAMP BACK TO NOTES FROM THE VICARAGE.
I will be using “Notes” to blog about our property overhaul and how all of that fits into our new-ish lifestyle.
This broken gutter hangs over my prayer porch…..DO YOU THINK I SHOULD KEEP THE OLD ROW BOAT SHAPED RAISED BED IN THE REMODEL?THE BACK PORCH NEEDS TO BE STAINEDNEW WINDOWS AND SHAKES?
I had one of those writer’s horrors happen yesterday. I was saving my “Bits Folder”, the folder where I keep all the work I have deleted from my novel but which I think is good enough to use elsewhere. I did something wrong and suddenly the “Bits Folder” was nowhere on my thumb drive. As near as I can figure I hit the wrong save and saved the form as a template which converted it from English to computer code.
For a moment I panicked. Then I remembered that I had built in redundancies just for this occasion. The Folder was saved to my hard drive and should that fail I also have a private cloud filter containing the work in raw form ( Should I need to resort to that it would be a lot of work to do over but at least it is there). So crisis averted. Still, the thought of losing all those words made me so emotional I had to step away from the writing world for the rest of the day.
This morning as I return to the editing process (which involves removing the word “suddenly” which I have used entirely too much in this book), I am thinking about the many people throughout our world who have watched their world’s go up in smoke over the last year. My little glitch sent me reeling and it wasn’t even really a problem. What is it like to be a that person who has lost their life’s dream to the year 2020?
It really hits home the fact that this is a season requiring massive amounts of grace. What are you going to do today to show the people around you grace?
Notes From the Vicarage 