Saturday, October 21, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
O Canada!
Follow the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. As it is written, “I have made you father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist.
Life moves on.
Thursday and Friday in Illinois included 12 counseling appointments and an oil change (for our car, not me), after 4444.4 miles plus a few more of traveling mostly in Canada, where that number of miles became 7,153 kilometers. And then last night Chris and Jack took me to the first Illini basketball game of the 2023-24 season.
I still have no idea how to calculate how much we spent using an American credit card to pay for liters of Canadian dollar-priced gas. But our dashboard says that on our trip our sweet white Prius averaged 42.4 miles per hour. And other than a little poke under the car to pull out a catalytic converter cover that caved in a bit, all we needed from Sam on Friday was an oil change and a puff of air in the tires. Unlike some of the other cars in the shop. Sam’s dog Cojo sniffed our tires and looked up at me approvingly.
Canada turned out to be sunset heaven. Gray mornings blushed out into afternoon blue skies, gorgeous white clouds and bright red sun by evening. My Google timeline has little red dots all over Canada’s Atlantic provinces. We had Thanksgiving dinner in Saint John Sunday night, turkey, prime rib and half price cocktails. Monday was Thanksgiving all over Canada.
In New Brunswick everything (almost) had to stay closed all day. Every Canadian employee got to sleep in, while we drove into Nova Scotia, where the rules changed and in Halifax we had no trouble finding gas, food, a motel, and even a ferry ride to at least get out on the water. All the fishing boats had shut down for the season, though, dampening our spirits just a bit.
No worries. An airBnB at the northern tip of Nova Scotia dropped into our lap, and we headed north by northeast early the next morning. It’s a good habit to stop every couple of hours, and we did. We drove along the east coast to the top of the world, to Meat Cove. Meat Cove Road slowed us down, with its various gravel and broken asphalt surfaces, but we got to our home for two nights just before dark.
Meat Cove has been for two hundred years a haven for fishermen, and maybe pirates. They anchored and then hunted the steep, forested hills for meat. That’s the story we heard. When winter sets in these days, the “law” leaves and the hunters still take their share of the forest’s bounty. We heard that too.
I think lots of us like to reach out to the geographic tips of places, as far as we can go before the water closes in. A campground around the corner from our two-night home (a trailer hanging onto the side of a hill) was half full at least. The Lawless Lobster Food Truck fed anyone who wanted great lobster rolls and seafood chowder. That included us. A couple from Kingston told Mike and Joyce their lobster was the best they’d had in seven days of exploring lobster shacks and restaurants all along the coast up from Ontario. Mike smiled but would not give him the recipe for their sauce. Of course not!
Thus shall your descendants be.
No lights make for dark skies, and the sky at the tip of Nova Scotia blew our minds. The longer we sat on the deck, surrounded by black night, the more stars fell into our laps. We will not experience this phenomenon again for quite some time. Leaving all the clingy gatherings-up of North America in October 2023, I settled in to this time and this place. For just a bit God caught us up in the whirl of eternity, where we could listen for voices before and after us, suspended in this short but very real moment of time.
The Lord remembers his covenant forever. He has bound us for a thousand generations. He leads forth his people with joy, with shouts of joy, his chosen ones.
((Romans 4, Psalm 105, John 15, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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