What does simultaneously preaching Christ to unbelievers and hoarding sin say about my relation to God? What does simultaneously confessing the sovereignty of God with my lips and kicking against His will and actions in my life say about the disconnect between what's in my head and what makes it to my heart?
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I picked up a walnut at Camp Curry this weekend. I hadn't been paying attention to the sort of tree I had plopped myself down under until my left hand, aimlessly shuffling through the grass while my right scrawled down various inept ponderings on the value of relationships, found a walnut amidst the dirt and ants. I picked it up, rubbed it a bit, and then smelled it.
Oh! The memories exploded over me then. Perhaps if one tree embodies my childhood best, it's a walnut tree. Their enormous trunks filled my childhood playground at the farmhouse in Illinois, leafy branches shading my memories. They dropped walnuts all over the ground, of course - larger than golf balls. Sometimes my family would intentionally collect them and spread them out in an even layer on the cement slab by the back garden, and then when enough time had gone by we'd cart them indoors and break them open with the nutcracker and meticulously dig them out with the walnut picks that I foolishly mistook for tiny crochet needles in my early youth.
But it's the silly things - the unintentional collections of two or three silly little girls - that I remember best. I remember pulling the hem of my shirt away from my stomach to create a sort of makeshift sack for collecting the green walnuts. Every year, I used my shirt or the skirt of a dress, and every year my clothes were ruined with the brown stains. I quickly learned that walnut sap was the cause of this, but I never stopped using my clothes for collecting (rather like picking dandelions: somehow, when your hands are full of them and you have to pile them in your shirt-sack, they'd leave small, brown circles all over your clothes, but though I acknowledged the source I couldn't seem to stop). We'd hoard the walnuts like squirrels: in our secret play-forts beneath forsythia and peony and pine bush, in the plastic sandbox shaped like a turtle... When we had no more room to hoard and plenty more walnuts, we'd go 'round the yard and find all the gopher holes (there were almost as many as fallen walnuts...). One was large enough to stop them up, but we'd usually stuff two or three down for good measure. (It did about as much good as trying to flood them out by pouring water from a tin cup ... running back to the pump to refill every ten seconds...)
So many more things I could barely remember or have completely forgotten - tossing them about and being told by Papa that I throw like a girl (I still do) - grinding up the outer, green layer for "perfumes" (usually ruining an otherwise nicely-smelling concoction of flower petals and water... somehow at the end, we'd always decide grass or dirt or walnut peelings would enhance the flowery smell wonderfully, and the result was a concoction that smelled of grass or dirt or walnut or all three, but always with the flower-scent completely eclipsed...) Or, in the summer of the June beetles, when the beetles were so plentiful you could shake them from the trees (various unpleasant memories of being lured under a tree by a ride on somebody's shoulders and then having beetles rained down upon me resurface here), we used walnuts to smash them because they didn't suffocate or drown.
But I wasn't in Illinois, and I wasn't under the age of eight anymore - I was at Camp Curry, and there was a walnut in my hand that was less than half the size of the ones in IL, and someone was whistling for us to gather for lunch, so I swept up my things and meandered back up the hill.
The walnut and its smell and the accompanying fragrance of the past seemed to press a stabbing sort of sweetness into my chest. I came to realize that while I don't necessarily miss the ease and beauty of my childhood or begrudge the days gone by, but I know they were very, very good days. Better still, they were made by a very, very good God, and I can see His goodness in wonderfully extravagant measures through them: in stained shirts and lousy shots squashed beetles and gopher holes - but mostly in the walnuts.
I've still got the walnut in my purse. It's good to remember.
One more reason to believe that our past is part of our blessing for the future. In the worst times of our lives, we can look back and see just how much God has done for us. 'Tis indeed very good to remember.
You're not the only one keeping up :)
I remember childhood days with black walnuts. They summers of gathering them with my brother and sticking them in my dress pockets.
The days of filling the pockets up time after time for walnut warfare that would occasionally break out at my grandmother's.
Ah the good days.... Thank you God.
You changed your blog lay-out! :)
Eh? New blog layout, I see. :o)