Intoxicating perfume from lemon blossoms envelops me as I step across the threshold into my garden, a haven of healing and hope during these days of Coronavirus quarantine. Lemons and their grafting root of wild orange adorn the branches like jewel pendants amidst blossoms of next season’s yield now casting off their flowers and some of their fruit to make way for the future.

Lemon juice from these lemons will go into the freezer
awaiting a debut for tourists and friends who come
to The Place of Stories for an off-road lemonade memory.

I’ve gathered castaway blossoms and the lemons dropped today into a small reservoir of enamelled pottery, allowing the fragrance to linger. What is it about castaways that tug at our heart when we see them strewn on the ground or assigned to a junk pile? For some of us, they engender our sense of stewardship for a world out of control, while beckoning our innate creativity to even seep under the door of quarantined lockdown to lift our spirits and inspire others.

This collection of castaways shines in my sun-dappled patio spotlight,
delighting the eye and capturing the senses.

One of my favorite castaway stories began November of 2012 in the dusty cloud of home renovation. Yes, all of you who have been there are clearing your throat and breathing a sigh of relief that the dust explosion has ended and you can breath again. Well, Gary and I were both convinced that this retreat we named “The Place of Stories” would be filled with many stories evidencing that God, the Master Designer, cares about the details of our life. In my daily journal I wrote this prayer, “Lord, fill the corners and clefts, inspire through verse and visuals, encourage with story and song. Let the presence of Your Spirit and the evidence of Your residence create an inviting refuge which speaks to the very soul of all who enter or even pass by our gate.”

At the time, we were struggling over what to do about a custom stairway design which would fit the dimensions of the stone tower addition and also be able to safely accommodate the flue of a wood stove we shipped from the US with our household furniture. Thoughts of waiting months on design and fabrication, plus paying exorbitant prices, were spectres threatening peace about the project. We prayed. We were two weeks away from hitting the “Stop button” for our winter return to the US.

A few days later, Gary went to our local family-owned hardware/lumber store for supplies. Gary and I were regulars there and the grown sons, Doron and Yaniv, who ran the store for their retired father were friends, including Sala their paint-guy who loved our basic banter in Arabic. Gary asked Doron if he had a suggestion for finding a design contractor for the spiral stair frame. We had admired the office spiral stairs with handmade wooden treads for nearly five years and Doron told us that his father Yehi’el custom made them, but he had been retired for some time and “now just hangs out in his office these days.” Doron mentioned that behind the lumber yard there was a junk pile of scrap metal and a discarded stair frame unwanted by a customer who had ordered it and couldn’t pay for it. “It wouldn’t hurt to look,” Gary thought.

Like a diamond in the rough, this trash-to-treasure find,
rusting for years in the junk pile, was waiting for us.

The next week I went for supplies and found Yehi’el at his hardware store. I begged him to follow me back to the house and see if the stair frame would fit our space. He agreed, but stressed, “I’m a pensioner now and no longer work.” He measured like the stair-master he was and said it would definitely fit like a glove if only the bottom step was removed. As he stood in the stairwell tower, barren for over a year, his measuring tape snapped back into its shield. He turned to us with a glow on his wizened face and began showing us photos on his phone of stairs he had done in years past. “I want to do this job myself,” he announced proudly. “I told you I don’t work anymore, but for nice people like you, I do it.”

You could see the adrenaline of usefulness and purpose flood back into his veins. Not only the stair frame was getting re-purposed, so was Yehi’el. Within a week he welded it in place and soon he was showing the photos of his installation to everyone at his store. His stair career was reborn that day and our prayer was answered—along with an inspiring story from a God who cares about detail.

The “Tree of Life Stairway” not only moves you to a higher level, it draws
your eyes upward, as well as your soul. Gary hand-shaped each eucalyptus
stair tread. The arched window I retrieved from a refuse pile in an
upper room of a church on the Via Dolorosa now has a place of honor.

The Hebrew root word sha-lawk means “to throw out or throw down, fling, cast away or cast out.” It is a word used when trees shed their blossoms. The term was used when Joseph, rejected by his brothers, was cast into the pit only to be sold and transported to Egypt where he rose to power under Pharaoh then saved his people from famine. Another Pharaoh ordered all of the Israelite baby boys to be cast into the Nile to reduce the threat of a growing Israelite presence in Egypt, but Moses was lifted out of those waters to become like a son of Pharaoh. Later, Moses was asked by God to cast down his shepherd’s staff and it become the vehicle for leading the Israelites out of Egypt to freedom in their Promised Land. Jonah was a castaway in the belly of a great fish where he cried out to God for mercy and his experience took him to an unexpected place of compassion for his enemies in Nineveh. In each of these cases the castaway became like a stairway for rising to a higher level—a greater purpose.

Has anxiety gripped your heart in these days of uncertainty? Have you lost your job? Is the isolation of this quarantine season causing you to feel purposeless or abandoned in a pit of despair? What if you were to take a look in the “junk pile” of your heart and mind where you’ve tossed things which may now benefit not only you, but others? Ask the Master Designer to put your eyes on something cast away which could be your stairway to another level or your deliverance from the pit you find yourself in today. It will probably be in a hidden place, the place of castaways—out of the limelight. Seek beauty in the mundane. Cry out to the God of detail. Find hope in knowing that the shedding of blossoms must happen to make way for a bountiful crop. Raise a toast of lemonade with me and let’s use this time of reflection to prepare us to move into our destiny. I’m keeping my eyes open with expectation.

 

Enjoying the walk home,
Cindy

**The Writers’ Gathering that was scheduled for March 2020 is now postponed until a future date in October of this year.