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328 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
Now we have the news that the state has an execution warrant for Billy, and the
darkness deepens. But on the day I heard the news, I received a letter from Billy,
which ended: “Tell Jack I said everything shall be okay simply because God is in
control of my life.”
We desperately need to note that life of faith in our world full of fear. It is
a life full of courage, possibility, and hope. Billy knows death like none of us
knows death, yet he has looked on Jesus with the eyes of faith. He has heard the
words: “Courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid!” Billy has answered Jesus’ call to follow
him. He has taken the risk of faith, stepped out of the boat into the sea, and has
not drowned.
The promise is food for us, too. We need to take the dark places of fear in
our lives and turn them to the light of faith in Jesus. There are reasons to have
faith. The Israelites were led through the Red Sea, out of slavery into the
Promised Land. Pharaoh’s army drowned. Jesus is alive! Death has lost its sting!
Have courage! God is on our side.
“Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall,”
by Elizabeth Dede
M a y 1 9 9 3
When I was in high school, one of my English teachers required us to memorize
one thousand lines of poetry. Being a somewhat lazy scholar, I decided to
commit several of Robert Frost’s poems to memory, because most of them had
a regular rhyme scheme and meter. If I got the pattern down, I found it easy to
fit the words in and to remember the whole poem. Consequently, I can recite
one thousand lines of Robert Frost. At the time it was a chore, but I have since
grown to love the poems. I suppose my favorite is “Mending Wall,” which, incidentally,
was more difficult to learn because it didn’t fit the pattern of the other
poems.
In high school I knew little about walls and fences and barriers, although
they were there; I can look back and see how they surrounded me. Since those
days, I’ve had some experience of walls, and there is an essential truth in Frost’s
beautiful opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
We’ve seen it at Dayspring Farm, where an old stone wall, much like the one
Frost wrote about, began to tumble. Now it’s been wonderfully rebuilt by our