A Missouri friend warned me a week ago I shouldn’t write more about the 75 degree temperatures in Nicaragua if I want any friends when I returned to Iowa.
“Just a thought,” she commented.
OK, Maureen, I won’t.
But I am sitting in the wooden swing on a tiled patio among leafy trees. The clouds on the horizon shine brilliant white above the sun. A late afternoon breeze cools the air. Doves coo, songbirds chirp. Distant motors hum. Life is good.
Harley Jansen, part of the service-and-learning team joining us here soon, emailed a blog entry in which James Schaap lamented his pressured life. “There wasn't enough time in the day for all the work that had to be done, and the Lord knows I can't--I won't--operate at anything less than maximum output. I'm a Calvinist, after all. Failure is not an option .. . . When it really gets bad, my heart rises like a bloody balloon in my chest and beats out a rhythm so heavy that I can feel it in my throat, as if I'm going to burst.”
In Iowa, that bloody balloon often beats in my chest too. But not here, not this week.
“Sometimes,” Jim writes, “I think I could use a good healthy shot of sloth.”
My week has not been a dose of sloth. I have set appointments, conducted interviews, taken pictures, emailed my co-author Donna Biddle, and edited notes without a heavy rhythm in my throat.
Jim says he’s posted a wildflower picture with the word “Consider…” at his desk. But he hasn’t paused to consider the lilies in awhile.
The sun lowers and the clouds glow golden. They are my lilies, considered with my skin and eyes and ears.
And mysteriously, in ways I do not understand, the my work this week has also been a kind of considering.
Jim, my friend, perhaps considering is not a shot of sloth.
Jim Schaap is a former classmate and a writer. His complete blog entry can be found at: http://siouxlander.blogspot.com/2011/02/lament.html
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