When the Homily is about Immunology

Dreaming under the January stars

As has become my custom, after dinner I headed outside to collect some split some firewood.

After an hour of hacking away in the woodshed, trying to make room for the harvesting of God's wind provided bounty, I paused on the way back to the house to further examine the progress my wife had made on the chicken run fencing. Somehow, even though homeschooling the kids and tending to our home's daily needs, she found the time to start stringing the fencing. She is a pioneer.

I looked around the dark scene. The ground was drying out, its saturating water draining down into the seasonal lake or evaporating into the sky above which was shockingly clear. Many old old familiar friends paraded above: Orion, Taurus, Pleides, and Ursa Major was rising up from the tall cedars to the north. The hazing milky way meandered from one towering confier to another on the oppostie horizon, and there was not a sound to be heard. No wind, no neighbors (not even their generators), no traffic, and no distant freeway. It was a beautiful evening...once again well worth the long daily commute to get here. How odd to experience, at home, the ethereal night time beauty of the forest usually reserved for camping trips.

I looked again at the fence...we are making progress, slowly but surely. And as I walked back into the house to press forward into the incorrectly seen as mundane everyday life, I found myself singing a little song that I had not even thought of in a very very long time:

If you want your dream to be
Build it slow and surely.
Small beginnings, greater ends.
Heartfelt work grows purely.

If you want to live life free,
Take your time, go slowly.
Do few things, but do them well.
Simple joys are holy.

Day by day, stone by stone,
Build your secret slowly.
Day by day, you'll grow, too,
You'll know heaven's glory.