They are rising all around me, like cardboard-box-replicas. One after another, after another.
My daughter sits next to me, months after wondering what they were building around this growing town, off the exit on I5.
My mind can’t get over how they are all the same. Like fortressed of straight walls, peering up against one another, taking over the wide open space…
Where deer used to come with their fawn each Spring and eat from the wide reaching apple trees.
What is happening to the land? And why is it becoming a rare commodity?
Apartments rise. This place looks like my visit to China; buildings half build, infrastructures smothering the land, still not quiet sure when or if people will ever reside in them.
We used to see the sky. Peer over the hills of green, all the way to the railroad tracks, where we crossed to get to our house.
But now, retirement homes, and so many roads winding with residence stacked in tiny spaces, one on top of another, on top of another.
We left the city for the country, a dozen years ago when our home had just three, instead of the almost dozen it has now.
Thinking the city won’t catch us, time won’t grab us, and our kids could play in the fields outstretched from us.
But, I have been deceived.
As a little girl, I remember clearly, driving with my dad down this same stretch of land, off I5. Compared to where we lived at, the place seemed barren…
No Costco. No Target. No dozens of others stores, let along apartments, as far as the eye can see.
And wise one, with the thick, calloused hands told me…I remember it clearly, just like it was yesterday…
“See this area? It won’t be long until it become a full blown city. When you grow up, you won’t even recognize this place.”
I thought my old man, who I now realize was the prophetic one, could see into the future. Sorrow filled his eyes as he knew what this once one restaurant and one gas station would become.
He knew you couldn’t stop the ever growing expansion of people. And he was right. They came.
And yet, I remember an ache in his voice, as he spoke forward in time. An almost wanting to turn his own childhood backwards, to a time when the world was simpler…
When grass and that one gas station, open skies, and fruit trees fed creation, remained and never died in the crevasses of the mind.
I sit at a restaurant.
Faces are stuck in their few inch, shiny screens. Do they not see the person sitting across from them?
Have they not experienced loss, like I did of my father…Reminding them that time is but a vapor and nothing is guaranteed?
Why do we throw it all away? The sound of the robins announcing Spring; the grass that gives life to the small and unseen?
Have we thought our way is better? Convinced ourselves that cement kingdoms will not collapse, ever?
Have we forgotten the earth that feeds us, takes care of us still today? The trees that fill our lungs with oxygen?
When did we turn inward, selfish, and decided to burn it all down?
I remember another garden.
The one God placed his children in. To live and move and have their being. To take care of and nurture and feed them from what He had given.
But they too, wanted something more. Something better than what God had offered them.
Greed filled their hearts until they made their own choices. Using knowledge as a weapon to dethrone the commands of God.
And yet, don’t we still do the same?
Take what He has given us and proclaim and paste our own brand over what He has created?
Don’t we long to build our own kingdoms, open up our own access to the world…Because living and loving, eating and embracing our own family isn’t enough.
We look and keep looking.
Isn’t that what all the peering into our small shining screens has been all about?
Being dissatisfied. Having discontent hearts. Longing for more than the plenty God has given us.
And still, we are all guilty. Each and every one of us.
We may not cut the trees down and build cement castles with our very own hands. But even then, we are a society discontent…
As marketing swims into our subconscious and lures us to a life where we must have this. We must have that.
When will we be content? When the deer are no more and the apples have rotted? When the grass has all turned to concrete and our walls stop promising safety?
And will we ever find true joy? Joy that comes from not building bigger and better, but is often found is living simpler, for the here, now. Seeing and really embracing the ones that we love.
My father was right that day as we drove in his car down our now growing land, where the sky line is blinded out by big buildings…
Promising a major city where farm land used to be.
Still, I would be naive to think I could stop it.
Ignorant to think the whole world collectively will stop taking over God’s creation, polluting it with zombie-like walkers strung out and begging on the streets…
And that we’ll never go back to small town living.
Yet, in my heart, I will appreciate what my dad valued. Hold onto those memories where a man and his daughter breathed in the country air, and held on, just for a moment…
Before phones and buildings took over the world.
Blinding us from the beauty of the people who are near us, and the creation that has only blessed us…
Announcing from the skies line, what we were actually made for.
