Overall Best of 2012 at The High Calling

I saw this afternoon that two articles I posted this year at The High Calling have been named to the Overall Best of 2012 List.

One was an interview I did with Ann Voskamp, author of One Thousand Gifts. Here it’s really all Ann, who had some insightful and wonderful things to say. (And I’m still trying to figure out how she pulled me into that argument on national health care that night at Laity Lodge.)

The second was an article I wrote as part of the “I Do” series for The High Calling. In short order, I had read two articles about people making decisions to divorce. I read the articles, and my heart and mind cried out, “No!”

You can see the entire list at The High Calling. All this week, The High Calling has been posting the best stories from each of the categories it publishes. Some 1,600 article were posted this year.

My secret for having two articles on the list: I worked with an outstanding team. We encourage each other to do our best. The team deserves the full credit.

For the least of these

Two people whose blogs I follow are Ann Voskamp and Shaun Groves. Ann is the bestselling author of One Thousand Gifts; she and her husband David farm in Ontario, Canada. She’s also a contributing editor at The High Calling, and I was able to meet her in person last year at Laity Lodge. Shaun is a recording artist based in Nashville.

Ann and Shaun are part of a team for Compassion International helping to publicize the need for sponsoring children. They travel to some rather exotic places – not exactly the places you or I would normally go for a vacation, even a working vacation. Shaun has traveled to Ethiopia and East India for Compassion, and he and Ann have previously been in South America.

For the past several days, they’ve been  in Ecuador. Not Quito, the capital city, mind you, but out in the areas near and in small towns and  the Amazon jungle.

Ann even convinced her husband to come along for this trip, despite his worries for the farm back home. He was particularly concerned, she writes, about the pigs being taken care of, and what should he find when they’re visiting a small farmer in Ecuador but pigs.

She and Shaun have been posting for the past several days, and posting both photos and videos.

Shaun has been posting about a little boy named Jivinson, who keeps a memento on the wall of his house from his heroes – a letter from the couple who sponsor him; how a church – suffering persecution and occasional violence – began to grow; and several photo essays, including one, “Ecuadorian for Home,” that will give you some sense of how too many people of the world live – and these are among some of the more fortunate ones.

Ann has been writing about a 15-year-old boy named Jonathan, whose story will break your heart and fill it with hope; taking pictures she calls “portraits in need;” and a young girl named Lidia.

This week, I started listening to a music CD by Shaun entitled “Third World Symphony,” which is helping support Compassion. (I bought the CD because I’m iPod-impaired.) You can listen to what Shaun and Ann have been writing about in their travels, translated into songs sung from the soul.

Here is “All is Grace,” one of the songs from Shaun’s CD, inspired by Ann’s book One Thousand Gifts:

For more than a decade, until the organization’s project was completed earlier this year, we sponsored a little boy in Kenya. You can’t imagine the joy of receiving letters from a little boy in a remote village whose life has been profoundly changed because you cared enough to give the equivalent of a dollar a day.

We will shortly be sponsoring two children – another boy in Kenya a girl in an orphanage in India. Read Ann’s and Shaun’s blogs, and please consider sponsoring a child.

You can’t imagine the blessing.

Ann Voskamp's "One Thousand Gifts"

A meditation. A devotional. A confession. A prayer. An explication of Scripture. A plaintive cry.

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp is all of these things, and more. I’ve never read a book quite like this one. I’ve never been moved in quite this way by a book, either.

She begins with an accidental death – of her sister when they were young children. The death and its aftermath, an aftermath that never really ends, radiate outwardly. Embracing and engulfing the family, ricocheting and echoing through time, affecting and touching so many and so much.

Voskamp asks this question: “How do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?”

And then she answers it, by taking us on a journey that is rather unexpected – the journey of the daily, the small things, those little things that comprise a day, a moment, a life. She begins to see what she calls the eucharisteo, a combination of grace, thanksgiving and joy. It’s there. It’s there for her and for all of us. But this journey happens in fits and starts, advances and setbacks, something we all recognize as life.

She starts keeping a list of gifts she already has, the gifts she purposely begins to notice, like the “cry of blue jay from high in the spruce.” The list eventually reaches and passes one thousand gifts.

Along this journey, we find time, grace, aching hurt, disbelief, emptiness and intimacy. And we find God, always God, for that’s to whom this book is really addressed.

An honest, raw and bleeding, loving epistle to God.

It’s remarkable.

And I've started a list, too.

1. Snow lingering like cake frosting in our north-facing backyard.
6. Two little boys standing outside the grocery store, collecting food for the hungry.
9. The church choir bursting forth with "All Creatures of Our God and King," and singing a leavening of Alleluias.

She's right. It's eucharisteo.

Ann Voskamp blogs at A Holy Experience.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday: Digging Out

It that's time again: another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday, hosted by our fearless leader Marty Duane Scott, who lives somewhere near the Arctic Circle (Iowa).

This past week has been all about – digging out.

The big winter storm that started Monday night and concluded Wednesday turned out not to be the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” it was predicted to be – for St. Louis. Actually, the snowpocalypse was farther to the north – I saw the pictures of Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, and Interstate 70 was closed from just west of St. Louis to Kansas City – that’s some 200 miles of highway. My youngest son reported a foot of snow in Kansas City.

We had about two inches of sleet on Tuesday (which was an absolute blast to remove from the driveway; yes, it was frozen solid) and about three inches of snow that finally ended late Wednesday afternoon. And, since you asked, that is indeed a picture of yours truly, victorious at having just finished shoveling on Wednesday, at least until the predicted snow for this weekend.

Yes, I fully understand that weather does not equal climate, but forgive me for what I think and mutter under my breath when I hear former vice presidents and various scientists try to explain that all this snow is happening because of global warming. I would like to invite the former vice president to come to my driveway and shovel all the global warming off of it. I’ll make him a cup of global warming tea while he shovels. Green tea, too.

Our offices at work have been closed for two days, which means working at home. It’s no surprise, but I get more work done at home. We’ve still had some of our scheduled meetings via phone, but they don’t last as long. Since a great deal of my work happens online, I’m good to go as long as we don’t lose power. Four years ago, we lost power during an ice storm, and we lost it for four days.

I’m almost finished One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Oh, what a book this is. It’s mediation, rumination, reflection, devotional – all these things and more wrapped up in simple, plain language straight from the heart. She takes the everyday and finds the beauty and the thankfulness in it. But then she takes it to another level altogether. It’s a wonderful book. (A lot of other people think it’s a wonderful book, too. It was just published in January, has more than 200 reviews at Amazon, and hit #10 or #11 in its category on Amazon’s best-sellers list.)

I met Ann at Laity Lodge in Texas last fall. She’s from even farther north that Marty Duane – she lives in Canada. Her husband Darryl is a farmer. To read her book now is like talking with her then – she is exactly like the book she’s written.

Another good thing this week – the long-awaited DVD set of series eight of the British spy drama M1-5 arrived in our mailbox. Since last spring, we have watched seven seasons (via Netflix, mostly). We had a real problem with Season 5 – Netflix didn’t have enough copies, and someone was keeping the first disk set forever. We were such fans that I finally said phooey on Netflix and ordered series 5 from Amazon. It was buy it or wait six months. We bought it. It’s one of the best written, best produced television series we’ve ever seen, even if the Americans (the CIA) end up being the stereotyped bad guys most of the time (or, if not the bad guys, at least Machiavellian and untrustworthy). We’ve seen two of the 10 episodes, and we’re torn between wanting to watch them all now and pacing them out.

That’s plenty pleasant disturbances for one week.


To see more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday posts, visit Marty Duane Scott at Scribing the Journey.

Photograph: Husband Freezing by Janet Young, taken from the doorway of the nice warm house while husband shoveled in the freezing cold. Used with laughing permission.

Thanksgiving: Of Such Is Greatness

My first thought is of roads.

Quiet roads. Roads busy with traffic only in the spring and fall, when planters and combines and tractors are being moved from shed or barn to field, from farm to neighbor’s farm. At other times, empty roads, a little busier on Sundays when families head to church or on weekdays when the school buses are picking up children, but quiet roads nonetheless.

The roads meander between fields of corn and soybeans, wheat and sorghum, dairy farms and a few orchards here and there. Roads connecting farms and towns, neighbors and friends, work and rest. Pickup trucks carrying seed and supplies travel these roads, as do trucks hauling corn and beans from the harvest.

When we think of what ties countries together, we think of information networks, interstate highways, airline schedules, train tracks. And yet, these roads that have names like “A” and “D” or FM 27 are our geographic arteries and blood vessels. Without them, and the work they support, all the rest wouldn’t matter. Silicon Valley exists because your average farmer In Iowa or Ontario produces enough food each year to feed 150 people. People like me and my family.

This fall, I spent a few days at Laity Lodge in Texas with a group of writers who are part of the staff for The High Calling. One of them lives off one of those roads in Iowa. The other lives off one of those roads in Ontario. They’re both writers, mothers and farm wives. And neither of them would bristle at being called a farm wife because they and their families know exactly what that means.

Jennifer Dukes-Lee and her husband Scott farm in Iowa. Jennifer was the political correspondent for the Des Moines Register before she and Scott moved to his family’s farm to take his dad’s place. I could tell you all kinds of things about the Lee family – I’ve been following Jennifer’s blog for more than year – but you should visit her there first. And you will learn a lot about farming, and family, and values, and faith, and what’s important in this life.

About a year ago, Jennifer was writing with a catch in her throat; I could sense it and feel it with every blog post. It was Scott’s first harvest to manage on his own, and it was one of the most difficult harvests in recent memory. Planting had been late because of wet weather; and harvest was equally late. Scott was often in the fields at midnight and later, and he finished and shut the barn door on his equipment just as the snow started. A lot of farmers weren’t so fortunate, and were harvesting in the snow. But I could read the tension in what Jennifer was writing and see it in the photographs she posted.

Ann Voskamp and her husband David farm in Ontario. At Ann’s blog, you can learn about family, and faith, and tradition, and values, and the beauty of day-to-day living. Both Voskamps come from farming families, and family is an idea that will surface again and again in her writings.

This spring, the time had come for her oldest son to climb up into the cab and learn how to till and plant fields. She captured his nervousness exactly, because it mirrored her own. And one picture told the story: her father-in-law, her son’s grandfather, sitting in the cab with her son, his hand on the young man’s shoulder, her husband holding on to the side as he listened. Teaching, passing on knowledge, the embracing of a tradition.

All of what happens on that farm in Iowa, and all of what happens on that farm in Ontario, is the stuff of what makes countries like the United States and Canada great and prosperous nations, even when economic times are bad.

And all of that greatness comes flowing down those roads, eventually finding its way to each of us.

My thanks to Jennifer and Scott, and my thanks to Ann and David.


Photograph: In the Country by Bobby Mikul, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Eighth Day of Christmas: Farm Life

Most of my online friends know I work in the agriculture business. If you don’t, well, now you do. Over the last three months, following a fairly extensive reorganization, I’ve found myself doing some new things and some old things in different ways.

And one of those is that I’m doing a lot more writing at work, and that’s a good thing for me. I’ve become one of the four corporate bloggers, and I’ve been able to spend a lot less time “administrating” and a lot more time talking with employees, customers and other people in the agriculture business. I now lead a team responsible for online strategy and the corporate web site. And I love working in this business.

In recent months, I’ve been following blog posts by people in farm families – men, women and even some older children. Ann Voskamp, for example, lives in Ontario with her farmer-husband and children, and she writes an incredible blog of text and photos called Holy Experience. Maureen Doallas did a post on her the other day that I couldn’t hope to improve upon; you should read it and find out more about her.

And then there’s Jennifer Dukes Lee, who has a blog called Getting Down with Jesus. She writes about her family and she writes about farm life, and she writes well – no surprise that in her spare time she teaches college journalism. The Lees live in northwest Iowa, and while I took some liberties and made it a bit more general, they were indeed the inspiration for two of my favorite posts since I’ve been doing this blog – “A Farmer in Northwest Iowa” and “Harvest Thanks,” a poem I posted on Thanksgiving.

This year has been hard for farmers – a wet spring that delayed planting; a wet fall that delayed harvest to the point where there is still unharvested corn standing in a lot of fields. In early November, Jennifer wrote about the late harvest, with photos illustrating the story – her husband on the combine in the fields at night. At Thanksgiving, there was still corn in the fields, and she described the encouragement of a letter from 1912. And she did a post about the worry of a late harvest and the faith that sustains a family that is simply a beautiful thing to read. And when I asked her via email if they had been able to complete the harvest before winter weather hit, she said yes, they did. In fact, her husband was closing the doors on the combine just as new snow started.

So I can read articles in farm publications and reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and my own companies news releases, and learn a lot of facts, data and important news. And then I can read Jennifer’s blog and learn a lot of the reality of farm life, and faith, and family. You should, too. You'll be the richer for it.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)