Yesterday I went to an animal park with my grandchildren. What a glorious day! We took the horse drawn wagon ride that takes you through the park and allows you to feed the animals. Deer, water buffalo, elk, pot bellied pigs all circle the wagon wanting you to feed them. You get up close and personal with wet noses, long tongues, and big eyes. Great fun.

The only part of the ride that always tends to make me sad is when you go to see the rhino. He is all alone in a walled compound of dry Carolina clay. Usually he is lying under his little shade canopy. Every time I see him I think" this is not how it is supposed to be ...you don't belong here." But for the other animals I have always thought what a great life, until yesterday.

I drove home and pulled into my driveway at 2:00 in the afternoon, and there in my front yard stood a doe and a very young fawn. If it hadn't been my house I might have thought they were statues! I live on a city street not out in the country and yet here they were, very much alive. Not only were they alive and well, but they were beautiful and glorious.

What really caught my attention was my response to the deer. I was enthralled with them. I wanted to stand and watch them. I wanted to love them and take care of them. Their beauty captured my heart. Then I realized I didn't have that response to the deer at the park...or the goats...or the sheep... or the elk... or the birds. What was the difference?

In a word CAPTIVITY. I think I realized in a moment the glorious beauty of God's original creation and the great tragedy of the "fall". Our original job description was to take care of the zoological kingdom ( Genesis 1:28). We can only imagine what that might have actually looked like. Animal parks as good as they may be, are a faint reflection of that original calling. Captivity as kind and good as it may be some how shrouds the glory. That is what I was "seeing"; the animals at the park had lost their glory. I'd always seen it in the rhino, "this isn't the way it is supposed to be, you don't belong here". Now I could see it in the deer and the other animals. We purchase animals and put them in parks or zoos so we can get up close and personal and we see them like specimens, rather than an incredible part of God's glorious creation.

Glory is lost with captivity...it happens to humans too.

I went for a Ferris wheel ride. It wasn't a grand Ferris wheel like the one in Paris, no it was the kind found in small amusement parks. This one was perched on the side of a mountain in North Carolina.

My granddaughter was with me and perhaps that explains the reason for my death grip on the pole that acted as our safety bar and seat belt. Well at least I can use that for an excuse...but really I think it was fear.

What I noticed was a strange phenomenon. For most of the ride I was gripping very tightly on the bar and there was no joy, no beauty, no sense of anything but the feeling of that grip. But there were a few moments of freedom, of letting go, of release and in those moments came a flood of sensations. My senses awakened. I could feel my hair blowing in the breeze, I saw the the clouds and the mountains, I felt the warmth of the sun, I heard the laughter, and I tasted joy. Then the death grip returned and all that went away; eyes closed , ears deaf, touch gone, nothing but fear.

The next day I heard a sermon. It was all good information but toward the end the pastor said something that really caught my attention. "I have been told there are two kinds of people basically, those who are manipulative ( he had his hands closed tight in a fist facing down) and those who are contemplative ( he opened his fists and turned them palms up)."

Oh I got the message. I knew exactly what the Lord was showing me on that Ferris wheel ride. I spend most of my life gripping the bar in fear which is a control/manipulative based life. Shutting down my senses of sight, taste, touch, hearing, smell and most of all my heart.

The times I let go of this fear based life and become "contemplative"  my hands are open to receive all the life the Lord has to give me and I come alive....fully alive. What is impressed in my memory of the Ferris wheel ride are those few moments of well, glory. I have forgotten all the rest.

Ten cubic yards of mulch did not sound like very much. However, when the dump truck unloaded it in my driveway it was a mountain. A mountain of dirt basically. It took me about ten hours of hard labor to distribute the mulch to the beds in my backyard. I moved that mountain shovelful by shovelful, one cart load at a time.

In late afternoon, tired and very sweaty I put my shovel into the pile of mulch and  heard the Lord speak to my heart. "Each shovelful is like one prayer, by itself it doesn't seem to make much difference but look around."
I stopped and looked. The mountain was a small pile by now and the backyard landscape had been transformed. Prayer changes the landscape. Mountains of dirt are transformed into beauty one prayer at a time.