Earthy, a mixture of grass and dirt and sun and let’s face it, manure. That’s what I smell when I’m near a farm. It awakens my senses and pulls me alive. If someone could formulate this into a wax, I would wear galoshes and burn it. I would.

I think horses smell delightful as well.

Did camels? In the dust and sweat of the desert thousands of years ago, did camels emanate this kind of aroma?
I love their lips, horses and camels alike. They are soft in a way that no baby bottom can compare. I’ve run my fingers along their noses, felt the warm exhale as they breathe. It is a risk, this petting of 6 foot, 1,000 pound beasts. Camels bite.

Steel is quite a contrast to this. In early centuries it would have been bone or wood. I’m talking about sewing needles. (Can I pause and just mention that whittling something so small out of bone is incredible. A work ethic unknown in our day.) Now they range from a couple inches to half the length of a ruler. The eye, that stupid opening where a slobbery piece of thread never fits, can be as large as 6 mm. Or 0.23622 inches. I don’t know what this means except to say, teeny.

My feet are propped on a folding chair that doesn’t belong to a table. The wreath on my auburn front door is twingling in the glare of sunshine because it’s mid-morning and I haven’t taken time to unplug it. Debris from Christmas still abounds, and I’m letting cartoons play much too long. Because my heart is landing in the sands of the Holy Land.

“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

– Matthew 19:24 NASB

It can’t happen. One thousand pounds, fitted through six millimeters. All the spitting in the world wouldn’t get that thing slick enough to slide into a hole like that. It’s hopeless. 

But I just need the new model of the 4Runner because if we’re spending that kind of money and keeping it forever, I certainly don’t want to start out with an older body style. 
And my decorations are looking their age because all that we got after our vows is telling a decade-old story and I do not want get stuck in a rut.
Oh, and that bank statement needs higher numbers in the balance column without sacrificing my addiction to overpriced, delicious, so-worth-it coffee. 

“Gimme, gimme, gimme. I need, I need, I need.”

– Bill Murray, What About Bob  

It’s the mantra of America. And I’m guilty of it too.

I write in my journal questions I’d rather not answer. It’s painful to go here.
What is my camel? My eye? What feels like an overwhelming impossibility? 

-finishing a book that seems so beyond my capability
-walking back into relationships that seem dangerous, where heartache has not been absent
-a country that is truly free
-a garden, a shed, a house with a walk-around porch, and kids throwing footballs and sarcastic slurs with their daddy on acreage that is enough to stretch out but still close to town
-telling my personal story
-holding hands with a woman who has recently found a safe place to sleep and a warm meal, and wants someone to shed tears with her
-accepting my deteriorating body, my outdated clothes, my less-than-modern “stuffs” as my youngest says

If He asked me to give things up, could I?
If He asked me to go after it all with abandon, would I?
Am I willing either way?

“And looking at them Jesus said to them, ‘With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'”

-Matthew 19:26 NASB

Giddyup.