Prayers of Thanks

The road to Tuxedo, North Carolina


Everything we do that is sensual and alive and amazing is a prayer of thanks to God, I think. Sarah-Katherine Lewis

I spent my first summer at Greystone washing dishes and sleeping on the front porch of the worst cabin at camp. But the second summer, I cooked. Or more precisely, I chopped. I still slept on the porch, though. Mountain summers are nothing like the sauna-summers in the Jones Valley. Here, the acrid haze of the city gets trapped by the mountain and it's hard to take a good breath sometimes.

I spent a lifetime on the porch of the dining hall.

I saw the inside of vegetables all day--the hidden world in the cavity of a cantelope, the labyrynth of life in the seeds of a bell pepper, the pregnant tomato and the gauzy flesh of strawberries. On my breaks, I swam in Lake Summit and skied with my friend, Graham. (Wonder what happened to him? My FarmHouse friend, Troy Rhone, told me he married a beautiful girl.) I ate well, I slept well, I played hard. In short, I lived.

Here's a cross on the Pavillion looking out over Lake Edith.

Romans speaks about how humans shut God out of their thoughts so that they won't have to change the way they live in light of his truth. Paul says that if you do that long enough, you'll reject truth and finally, you'll start calling lies the truth and encouraging others to do so as well. Rome was a lot like the U.S.

The sad thing is that the lifestyle folks try to preserve isn't all that great. Trust me. I know.

I remember sitting on the dock at Lake Summit and watching the tiny drips of water fall off the fringes of my towel and thinking "These little drops are like every day I spend here. They're golden and soon, they'll be gone." (Pretty poetic for a teenager, huh?)


The Dining Hall.

For me, Greystone was a chance to see the ordinary as art and experience things as mundane as mushrooms in a new way (and really, for the first time.) The mundane is all we have. I expose my life to God and let him make the changes. He shows me how to live well. The mundane tasks of life done well are the pinnacle of life's experiment. The ordinary is all, and it's just enough.

Grestone the green.