The Healing Spring

Back in the woods, off the Infirmary Road, under this little tin roof, is the Healing Spring. I have stuck my whole head into the spring and breathed the water in, and was cured of sinus infections for several days. The trees along the quarter-mile path used to be decorated with pictures of the Pope and signs saying "Silence" and "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife," and there was even a wicker gate, very narrow, with a sign tacked to it that said "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way," but the path has undergone flooding and the monk who decorated the path and kept it nice died some years ago, and now there's a chain and a sign saying "Keep Out," but my business was too important. I had many choices and needed to ask God what I ought to be doing. So I went and knelt at the spring (which is behind the stone railing) and then lay down on a wooden bench looking up at the sky hoping to hear a directive. After a while I heard Him say, "Do SOMETHING. ANYTHING." Got up immediately, feeling energetic, and started for home where I began doing things, not paralyzed by fear of choice anymore, walking by faith and not by sight.

Heart Like a Rain Gauge

Ace climbs water towers and sets water pressure for small towns. His van is packed with tools and straps and ladders and gauges, including a Geiger counter. He showed me how some of gauges worked. The indicator needles jumped and held. "See these?" he said. "They don't lie."

I was amazed. Surely those things lie. Somehow. I keep testing my tire pressure over and over because I usually don't credit, at first, what the gauge says. But Ace makes a living by trusting his gauges, so he must be right: What gauges say is the reality.

Here's my rain gauge, sort of like a footlong shot glass, and its view of what fell last night: one and one-half inches of rain. This isn't good news for this part of Missouri. But it's a reality. Plans must be made for the rivers rising again this week. People are murmuring "Flood of '93," "Flood of '82." Makes an individual feel very small and feeble, and makes the heart beat harder.