Hope's Family Portrait

Link to Information regarding Johnsons Shut Ins State Park

Here is a link to a news/special interest story about Johnsons Shut Ins State Park (if you are interested) https://youtu.be/qMMQAeeYxrc

The T's Go Camping

For the last year now I have had a hankering to go camping.  No, not as long as I've had a hankering to eat blue gill, but long.  With summer two years ago moving to St Louis, getting adjusted to life and seminary, and then last summer being in summer Hebrew, there was just no time.  

So Kathee asked Karl to bring down our camping stuff from his garage which allows us to go camping this last summer before I graduate.  I am taking one class this summer, a two week class at the end of July called Spirit, Church, and Last Things.  Aside from that, I have tons of reading, studying, and other things to be doing.  

However, with camping stuff in hand, dates of camping decided, and inventory of said supplied complete, the only thing left was to determine where.  So after many an hour of going over websites to decide, I ended up texting my friend Craig about good camping spots within an hour or so from St Louis.  He texted back with a couple, so we chose Johnsons Shut Ins.  It is part of the Ozark Mountains, specifically in the St Francois Mountains.  

Here is the cut and pasted definition from the state park's website defining what a shut in is (because before this trip I thought they were elderly church people who are unable to attend church regularly).

The park is named after the "shut-ins" where the rushing waters of the East Fork of the Black River are "shut-in" by the hard volcanic rock. Over 1.4 billion years ago, violent volcanic eruptions created hard rhyolite bedrock forming the knobby shapes of the St. Francois Mountains. As the rhyolite cooled, it cracked in many places, creating pathways for flowing water. Over millions of years, water eroded the cracks into narrow channels. Scoured by water-born sand and gravel, the channels grew deeper and wider. The eroding action of water continues to shape these rocks into the potholes, the plunge pools below small waterfalls, and the chutes that form wild, natural waterslides that delight visitors today.

Also of note, this park was flooded in 2005 by 1.3 billion gallons of water that came cascading down due to a breach of a hydroelectric power station from a reservoir on a neighboring mountain.  We wondered why there were tons (literally and metaphorically) rocks bigger than our van sitting in the field in front of the interpretative center.  Very interesting.  

Lastly, today before we left, we went to Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, which was nearby, to check out their camp grounds (publicized as "rustic") and to go to the highest elevation in Missouri.  We ate a picnic on top of the mountain, went to the plague that proved so, and came home.  We had a blast!  

Echoes of Eden

One of the professors who has had an enormous impact on my life in seminary is a man named Jerram Barrs.  He has to be about the nicest man I have ever met.  And if life with Christ is going to be with people who act anything like Jerram, I am even more excited to get that started!  

One of the things he talks about often, and it may not have originated with him, is what he calls Echoes of Eden.  Where things are right in the world.  And beautiful.  And give a person a sense of something more.  We find these in good stories.  We find these in nature.  We find them in people.  We find them all over the place, if we are looking.  

I love nature.  I always have.  When I'm in nature, I see God's fingerprints all over.  Not in a pantheistic sense.  In the sense that God has spoken and by the power of His words, all this came into being.  So this time away for me was an exercise in echoes of Eden.   

 From the rushing water of the river...

 To the shut ins...

 To the calm after the storm...

To flowers whose names I don't even know...

 To views that are breathtaking...

And doing it with the daily Echoes of Eden that I get to call my family...

Our God is a good God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  His goodness is new every morning.  And we delight in living in and for Him each day.

Camp life

 We did a lot of just hanging around the camp site.  Here the two older girls are playing "school bus."  Since Gideon is finished with school, and with Hope learning that the next time he gets on the school bus she will be with him, she is teaching Esther what it's like to ride the school bus.  The hat is since she just finished riding her bike, not because they all have to wear helmets on the bus now!

 After the kids were in bed, Kathee and I sat and read.  On my semester/summer of CS Lewis, I grabbed The Four Loves and read most of it.  I'm a bit bummed that since it rained our first night (either that or my kids' water bottles that I had in my hiking bag leaked) my book got soaked and is now double the size it was when it had dry pages!  What a great book by the way...

 So good in fact, that I like to think this moth wanted to read some Lewis as well.  At least that's my theory.

 Eve chilled a whole bunch and did great.

 Hope loves her chocolate!

 And Esther had a blast having more freedom riding her balance bike.

 Eve was supposed to take naps in the tent, though that didn't happen as often as we'd have liked.

 We went hiking to see the Shut ins.  This is the east fork of the Black River.  It really reminded me of the time I got to go fly fishing with Kathee's uncle Mark on the Flathead River in Montana.  Wow!

 This is honestly a candid picture when we returned from seeing the shut ins.

 The shut ins where so cool.  We read that during the summer, the parking lot of 100 spots is normally filled by 10AM, which means these shut ins are packed with people.  From some of the youtube clips and the parks website, there are people everywhere in the summer.  It was good to be there before high tourist season.

 We got a bit worked up when Kathee pointed out the dog and the hat.  It turned out to be a photographer had climbed over the side to get what I think would be fantastic pictures of the shut ins.

 Esther loved being down by the water with me listening and watching the rapids.

 In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Big Falls, a place about 45 minutes from Camp Forest Springs that I loved going to on days off when I was a counselor.

 Although we were in bear country, and a sign was posted by the trail that bear frequently are nearby, it didn't seem as such.  There were no bear boxes like in Wisconsin and northern Minnesota.  The trash cans weren't bear proof etc.  I wonder as more bear keep coming north from Arkansas (can you really blame them?) if things will change?

 I took the two older kids fishing on the Black River.  The current was moving so fast, and I couldn't really find a place where it was calm, that we didn't get so much as a nibble.  But the kids had fun fishing, and we'll do it more this summer for sure.

 And within about 20-30 minutes they were more interested in playing in the sand than fishing, so we just hung out and played.  I think they had more fun doing that than feeding fish hot dogs anyway.

 A few years ago, when we were in Branson, MO, with the Terwilleger family vacation, Kathee and I bought a new tent and a new cook stove at a Coleman Outlet Store.  They are both awesome!  We used the tent once before this trip, when I slept in the back yard with Gideon.  I have made corn on the cob on the stove when we lived in Moline.  So it felt great to actually use them for their intended purposes!  The kids (all four) fit and slept great.  Kathee and I had air mattresses.  It was great for everyone!

 Our reader will read to anyone in the family at the drop of a hat.  This morning we caught him reading to Eve.

I couldn't help but think, "sooner than I think those flowers will be her wedding flowers," instead of the boquet she picked for Kathee this morning as we were packing up the van.  She is such a character.