A Slower Pace

Gorgeous weekend…..

The weekend that God has laid out before us shaped up to be even more glorious than I could have planned or expected. It started off with wonderful worship on Friday evening. That was followed by my normal Saturday morning Men’s Breakfast and Bible study.

On my way home, I took a nice country drive detour through a local town so I could swing by the local country store for garden starter plants. Unfortunately, they were not put out yet but I did pick up a couple of things. My conversation with the clerk was very pleasant and somehow turned to prayer. His mother-in-law Tina isn’t doing too well. He also shared with me that this last week his 93 year old dad gave him a scare with an emergency room visit. I said I would keep them both in my prayers and he was very thankful.

Our Saturday late morning and afternoon were spent preparing for our first “party on the patio” or “POP” as my wife refers to them. We invited quite a few families from church over to have good food, games, fellowship, and an impromptu bonfire. We all had a great time. The adults could eat and chat while all the kids were able to run around playing with each other. It all moved from inside and the patio to the back lawn as we set fire to a brush pile and then added more fuel to the fire. Chairs and quilts were brought out as everyone spent the remainder of the evening hanging around the bonfire and enjoying one another’s company.

Sunday morning I arose early to put water on the still smouldering fire. As I was doing so, I heard across on another farm the gobbling of wild turkeys. They were gobbling up a storm and it was so neat to hear them cut the quiet of the morning with their banter.

As we made our way down the street on the way to church in my wife’s truck, we passed by the gravel drive to one of the farms across the way. Something in the middle of the drive literally made me halt the truck and back up — against the wishes of my wife who was reminding me that we were late. What caused me to veer from our drive to church was the sight of two turkeys about 20 yards away. And it wasn’t just two turkeys which we tend to see with some regularity here in the Kentucky countryside. It was a male tom wooing a female hen. He was astrut in full fan and all puffed up. I had never seen such a thing. Usually they are just normal looking turkeys and I had a hard time identifying the males from the females. But when the males puff up, fan out and strut they are truly amazing. This tom was trying hard to woo the female as I described it to the kids. We watched only for a minute so as to not impede on his, hopefully, successful mating ritual. All in all, a very cool sight of nature. The picture below is not what I saw, but a good idea of the difference of the male vs the female when strutting.