The blast zone was eerily quiet. Sophie walked slowly over the dead ground, footfalls crunchy in the charcoaled remains of the world she had known. Her heart thudded, as loud as the sobbing breath heaving in and out of her lungs.
Already long shadows fingered the valley, shades of glory made barren. The time between first light and sunrise was pitifully small, but it was her only chance at leaving the Settlement. The Conclave allowed no one into the Barrens. First offenses meant time in the brig; second offenses meant one ration per day for a month and exclusion from assembly for a year. This was her third.
They had thought the plague would be the end of everything. It was the reason the Settlement had formed, deep in the mountains with rules designed to prevent infection and preserve a pocket of humanity. Sophie herself had spent a month in quarantine outside the border after plague took her parents. They had remained on their own land in the shadow of the monastery, cared for the sick and frightened, but with them gone there had been nowhere else to turn.
She wished she had stayed; Hell had arrived within weeks of their deaths, ending the suffering of all outside the Settlement. Leaving her alone. For two years on the Day of Purification she had snuck away to their ruined graves, her tears the only memorial left to give. For two years she had been caught by the Conclave and ostracized. This year they would Purify her in the square, though nothing remained to be cleansed, her soul as empty as the excoriated land.
Savannah groaned. Here she was, supposed to be photographing this society fundraiser, and the camera lens was dirty. Again. She reached in her bag for the lens cloth.
After a meticulous wipe that covered every square millimeter of glass, she nodded with satisfaction and lifted the camera again. She snapped a candid of a bored looking brunette and her plasticized escort. Was that a smudge on the digital display? No, it was the stupid lens again.
The cloth went to work again. This time she sprayed the lens with cleaner and shoved the cloth into the edges with her fingernail, digging. She inspected the results with a frown and looked around for her next subject. Just in time. The host was taking the stage for the official welcome. She raised the camera.
Was that a speck? Man, that thing was huge; her boss would fire her if that thing showed up in print! That did it. There was no way she was taking any more pictures until that lens was clear. She sat down in the nearest chair and peered closely at the camera.
It had to be so small the naked eye couldn’t see it for her to be missing it so badly. The camera would obviously make it look bigger, like looking through a microscope. She breathed on the lens to fog it and pored over the results. There, did it look like the fog didn’t settle in that spot?
The world shrank. The camera lens filled her vision. That had to be a streak. And was that dust? She wiped, sprayed, wiped again. She had to get perfect pictures; her job was on the line. If she didn’t get this fixed soon the fundraiser would be over. That lens certainly was filthy.
“What is this place?” Dax blinked in the shaft of light streaming through the scrollwork of the single window high overhead. His head hurt; for some reason he couldn’t remember how he got here. Wherever here was.
In the narrow fringes of light he could see walls covered with ornately designed panels, gold-leaf scrollwork glinting against the surrounding darkness. Beneath the window he could just make out a door, it’s frame marked by the same gold leaf designs as the rest of the wall. The door itself was a blank hole in the dim light, jarring in its luxurious surroundings. The floor was plain tile, an incongruous grate in the middle of it leading to unknown paths beneath.
Dax rubbed his forehead, then froze. Was that movement just beyond the light? He peered closer, barely distinguishing a black shape in the shapeless darkness. “Who’s there?”
“Choose your path,” a raspy voice said. “Above brings great blessing but great temptation. Below is fraught with danger but brings enlightenment. Choose your path.”
“Path to where?” Exasperation crept into Dax’s voice. “What exactly is it you want from me? I don’t even know how I got here!”
“You have accepted the quest,” the voice continued. “Only one can save the empire. Only one path will bring victory. You must choose now.”
“Forget it!” Dax clenched his fists and stomped over to the door. “This is either a really bad joke or you’re insane. I’m leaving; I’ll ask someone to direct me to nearest embassy. ” He yanked at the door and almost fell backward as it opened easily.
“Your choice is made.” The voice grew distant as his surroundings faded into nothing. “Let the quest begin.”
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven.” Matthew 5:10-12
Being an outcast is not generally a situation we humans consider enjoyable. No one enjoys being insulted, assaulted, or ostracized. We consider a life at risk or taken to be a tragedy. God designed us with a strong desire to connect with each other and to protect human life at all costs. Because of this, we tend to have difficulty applying the above verses. What could possibly make being ostracized something to be celebrated? If we are designed with the need for each other, why would we be told the opposite made us so blessed as to be envied?
The answer lies in previously mentioned blessings: humility, mercy, purity, hunger for truth, the ability to grieve, and selflessness. All of these blessings are characteristics that bind us to one another, lead us to pursue what is best for each other. They are qualities that lead to action no matter the cost, which fact leads us to another blessed character trait, that of peacemaker.
The world tries to, and far too often succeeds in, convincing us that peace can only exist in the absence of conviction, that it is only gained by giving each other exactly what we want when we want it. The problem is that there is no such thing as absence of conviction. Selfishness is the conviction that I am more important than anyone else, and is the source of such confused behavior. Peace can never be achieved by promoting selfishness; though some goodhearted souls may destroy themselves by trying to be all things to all men, those with conviction of their own importance will never submit to anyone else’s desires. They will end in conflict with other equally selfish individual, and no one will actually be satisfied.
Humility, mercy, purity, hunger for truth, the ability to grieve, and selflessness are also conviction, but not in self. They are conviction that we have a Source, a purpose greater than any human desire, a mission to convict others of the same. This conviction of and reliance on the Source of all we are and have eliminates the desire for validation of self. It quiets the commotion the world seeks to create within us by focusing us on the Source of truth. It leads us to seek to create that same quiet focus, that peace, within other individuals.
We can all understand the blessing of such inner peace; the entire world seeks after it even if they misunderstand how to get it. But what does being a peacemaker have to do with persecution? The peacemaker, the holder of conviction in greater than self, doesn’t cater to human desires, their own or anyone else’s. Those with conviction of their own self-importance cannot comprehend that kind of strength. They live in fear and misery because they can never actually get everything that they want and thus will never possess the security to not care how others react to them.
The peacemaker, knowing this, accepts personal tragedy as unimportant. The peacemaker knows that only the Source of humanity holds what is best for humanity, that nothing treasured by the selfish can bring true security, that no attack from the selfish can break the quiet of truth. They rejoice, not because they suffer, but because they are unbroken. They rejoice in the conviction that the blessing is so much greater than the suffering. They rejoice because they have eternal peace.
Bluing was it’s favorite time of waking. The sand, brilliant white for so many matings, took on the hue of Aurora for only three. Others avoided the surface during bluing, fearing the overling would walk the sands with her obliterating heat. R’ik knew better; so many matings it had spent alone in the beauty.
It tasted the soft silica, savoring the cool sweet flavor. Brighting soured the sand, drawing moisture from deep in the mountains to clump and harden the silica into cakes. The tribe would graze freely across the dunes, absorbing what life force the cakes held. Only R’ik avoided filling its wells, waiting for Aurora’s wings to soften and dry the surface for a treat it considered a blessing all for itself.
It stopped at the top of a tall mountain, surveying the deeply blown dunes below. The soft hues of the bluing stroked its sensors with pleasure more satisfying than any mating. Suddenly a white flash disturbed the surface, whipping around the crater of a dune as if driven by a great storm. Fear stabbed R’ik; perhaps the others were right and Aurora had come to punish it after all.
The tiny brighting stabilized, and others joined it, creeping from a shadow that had not been there when the tribe went below. Awkward creatures carried the tiny brightings with some evil magic; they moved on appendages too small to hold them and sank into the sand with every motion, and their bodies bulged in all the wrong places so that they appeared top-heavy.
R’ik shivered, dread filling it. What horror could take the power of Aurora and learn to wield it for itself? The power and evil of this strange being must be beyond comprehension to subdue Aurora’s wisdom. It must warn the tribe immediately.
She could still see the town below as if through a pea soup fog, street lights shining incongruous against the blue sky. It was near midnight when she had walked out of the glare of those lights into the darkness of the hills. She hadn’t expected the night to be so dense, nor for it to explode into sunlight within a single step.
Nothing made sense. The asphalt-paved county road she had chosen for her escape was now nothing but deep ruts in a sea of green. No trace remained of the farms and homes that had skirted the town; only bare, rolling hills marked the horizon instead.
She had shaken her head wildly and hefted her suitcase. It was a hallucination. Or a dream. Or… she had marched onward, ignoring the evidence of her senses. In a minute she would be alright. In a minute everything would be normal. When sweat had trickled down the back of her neck she had turned back to see the town bathed in white shadow, and knew.
She had been so desperate to get away, to disappear. Walking was a long shot, but it was the only chance she had to escape his omniscient fingers that probed every corner of the world. Her suitcase dropped from nerveless hands and she collapsed to her knees beside it in the red ruts. She would wait here. If he didn’t walk up that wagon trail by nightfall, she could breathe. A different time? A parallel universe? It didn’t matter. He would never find her again.
I’ve always found it hard to explain to questioners what we do as homeschoolers. Not because I don’t know what we do, but because most questioners have preconceived ideas of what constitutes education. They want to know what grade a child is in, what their letter or number grades are, what subjects they are taking, etc. Even babies and toddlers are expected to learn according to curriculum and schedules. The concept of learning in any other way is foreign to most of the modern world.
The truth is that all those preconceived ideas are a relatively recently created box. Once upon a time, education occurred from reading living books, experimenting, discussing, researching, and writing. The concept of grade levels did not exist; tests and scores would have no meaning. Mastery was determined by how well ideas learned could be practically implemented by students, or by how well a student could reason using what they had been taught. A successful education was considered to be the ability to think, discuss, and work, rather than the ability to regurgitate disembodied facts or fill out an answer key.
In the past the difficulty and expense of dispensing information restricted education to those with the means to pay such costs, but much has changed since that argument was used to support the founding of public school systems. Books are inexpensively printed on paper that costs pennies; photography and digital recording have replaced the tedious work of sketching anything to be studied later, as well as made records less destructable, and both can be done by anyone from a handheld device at the touch of a button. Technology has advanced to the point that communication from any point to any other point can be instantaneous with a miniscule cost. Because of the many tools now available, the education coveted and treasured by our ancestors lies at the tip of our fingers, and yet we can no longer comprehend its nature.
So, when I say we don’t know our grade level, I really mean my children are motivated to read books of greater difficulty in order to research their interests. When I say we don’t use a scoring system, I really mean that we work together on projects and correct mistakes until we understand all the elements of the project and produce the appropriate results. When I say that we have never taken a test, I really mean that my children can carry on an hour conversation with anyone who will listen about minute details of complicated subjects. When I say they haven’t memorized standard lists of facts, I really mean that they are capable of reasoning and arriving at conclusions on their own, often putting me to shame. When I say that I don’t have lesson plans or assign lessons, I really mean that my children have the desire to know and keep up with their own educational activities in special journals with my supervision and approval.
This is possible because not only do we function outside of mental boxes, but my children do not spend most of their life in the physical box of the classroom. As a mom of five, I can attest to the difficulty of monitoring, interacting with, and teaching discipline to only five children with five separate personalities and sets of needs. The classroom box renders such attention impossible and reduces everything within it to either rote and drone or total chaos. Neither lead to actual education, no matter how dedicated and caring the teacher; there is simply no space or time to do more than establish the ability to fall in line.
The world desperately needs a return to learning outside the box. I’m grateful for the freedom and the tools to pursue it.
When God called Moses from the burning bush, Moses already knew God. He had already felt a calling to help his people, a purpose greater than himself. Because his early efforts had failed, what he did not feel was equipped. He pleaded to be excused from the task because he did not think he had the tools to do it. God sent him anyway.
When Jezebel put a price on Elijah’s head, Elijah already knew God. He was a wanted man because he had taken a stand for God in the face of powerful retribution. He didn’t flee and hide because he didn’t believe in the cause, but because he felt discouraged. No one stood with him, and he could see nothing but lonely failure. God fed him, let him rest, then sent him back to stand again anyway.
When Saul’s entire focus bent toward killing David, the future king already knew God. Saul hated him because his great trust in the Lord had brought victory and respect of which Saul was unworthy. David didn’t flee Israel because he rejected God, and even in self-imposed exile he tried to help God’s people. He fled because he was tired and afraid. Not only was he in danger himself, but his entire family and thousands who supported him stood to lose their lives. God reminded him that danger was everywhere and sent him back to keep fighting anyway.
When Jesus sat in the garden facing death in the morning, He was God. He wept and trembled, not because He didn’t believe in His plan, but from the pain and grief of knowing what the people He loved would do, the suffering that was necessary for them to cause Him before they would understand His love. The angels comforted Him and He faced the cross anyway.
When the storm threatened the disciples’ ship, they already knew God. He was in the boat with them. They panicked, not because they weren’t aware of Him, but because they weren’t used to relying on Him. They thought they had faith because they believed He could save them. Jesus said they had none because they didn’t believe that He would.
So often we run – from the storm, from the task, from the danger. Perhaps we feel unequal to the challenge, think we lack tools needed to be successful. Perhaps we feel alone and cannot see how one person could make a difference. Perhaps the enemy is so massive that we see no other option but to hide, to pretend we are something other than we are. Perhaps the cost is so high, the loss so painful, that we must weep and tremble for a while. Perhaps we really do believe that, although God exists, we are still on our own.
It’s time to let God send us back to stand. Trust that He is equipped whether we are or not. Know that whether or not any human stands with us we are not alone. Shine against the pain of the world’s betrayal of our God. Let His peace still the storm.
It was June’s favorite spot at Maggie’s. The little antique shop on the square held everything from forgotten toys to glassware odds and ends, and the collection changed almost daily. Surrounded as it was by designer stores and expensive restaurants, Maggie’s was an unlikely success, but the window display stopped traffic every time.
She asked Maggie once why an old broken shelf covered with mismatched pots, cans, and boxes full of succulents. Other stores displayed the most appealing of their wares, carefully arranged and enticing. What did an unchanging window full of plants have to do with antiques?
Maggie had smiled mysteriously, and said to meet her three streets over an hour before opening the next morning. June was curious enough to agree, and the two of them joined the already bustling sidewalk throng as the pavement began to warm beneath their feet.
For an hour they walked up and down streets, dwarfed by metal and glass that reflected rather than blocked the sun. They cut through shaded brick alleys that smelled of yesterday’s trash and unwashed bodies. They peered in windows full of human imaginings. Then there was Maggie’s.
In a sea of gray, brown, and blinding, all June could see was green. It drew her, a smile widening across her hot face. The broken wood, the mismatched containers, all disappeared in that living cascade of color. June glanced at Maggie, who put her finger to her lips and turned the key. June was the last of a dozen smiling hustlers to enter and breath a slow deep breath of sudden peace.
Princess Scargo loves all living creatures, especially those that live in the water. One day, a neighboring chief sends her an amazing gift, a huge pumpkin decorated with carvings of all the land animals, and filled with a miniature lake stocked with fish. Princess Scargo spends many hours caring for and talking to her new pets.
Not long after, a terrible drought begins to destroy her tribe’s food source, drying up all the ponds and streams. Though the tribe does everything they can to preserve their land, only Princess Scargo and her pets hold the secret that can avert disaster.
This book is an adaptation of a well-known Native American legend. Many versions of the tale can be found, but none as delightfully innocent and childlike as this. Children will exclaim over colorful illustrations, and their imaginations will join Scargo in a culture long forgotten.
The Word Worker 