"Sure seems your strawberries are ready."

Minnie Pruisner lived at the corner of Market and First in a grand old square with a sloping front porch. Forty-foot pines lined the west side, separating her house from the Baptist church parking lot, an asphalt rectangle that passed as a bicycle racetrack most weekday afternoons.

Minnie was older than I ever imagined a person being, which means she was probably 65. She was somewhere in the senior ranks of my family tree, a Great-Great Aunt or something once removed. A lifelong bachelorette, she watched the world from that front porch, overseeing the second busiest intersection in town. Her sister Vera lived in the cottage just to the south. Vera kept a watchful eye over First and Main, and between them, the 300 souls of Steamboat Rock couldn’t have been in better care.

Our house and its lot were just up the hill from Minnie’s and the thrice-weekly walk to church took us right past that front porch. Minnie was not the older lady in the pew to hand out candies after church—that was saved for Deane Luiken—but she was kind, watchful and piercingly aware.

In my teenage years, when Minnie had moved to the elderly apartments a block off and her house converted to a youth group hideaway called “The Lighthouse,” my grandfather made a regular work of visiting her. When the world had long forgotten Minnie, when Vera had gone to be with Jesus, when the Baptist parking lot eventually even took over the Lighthouse itself; my grandfather visited her.

I was in my peak evangelical fervor in those days, frustrated that my grandfather (who I looked up to greatly) was not more involved in the machinations of church life. Sure they would attend religiously. But they were absent at the potlucks. Missing from Sunday School. Uninvolved in the progress and numerical GROWTH that I was certain the Lord required of any good gathering of people of faith.

“I’ve done all that in my time,” he would say. Which was true, he had been there when the sanctuary was built by church members themselves. “Church is a young person’s game.”

Back to Minnie

My dad’s strawberry patch was far off over the low ridge, a good two hundred yards from Minnie’s front porch. But on more than one June Sunday morning, you could hear Minnie over the coffee break turn to my dad who towered a foot-and-half over her, “Well, Keith, sure looks like your strawberries are ready.” He would smile and take her hand, shaking his head inside.

Minnie’s eagle eye stretched far and wide, but there was no physical way her watch reached all the way to the strawberry patch. Of course, the irony is she was rarely wrong. The strawberries were ready. Whether it was her decades in a farming family in a small agrarian town, her observant glance over my father on Saturday afternoons as he went out a checked the patch, or some combination of all of the above matters little. Minnie saw the world through her own eyes. She lived it at the intersection of cross-streets. She bartered in the community over the shaking of hands and styrofoam cups of coffee in the church lobby.

It took me decades to realize that my grandfather’s watching over her after she had watched over all of us was more church than the bulk of my institution-building, crass rock-concert marketing would ever be. Like millions of others, I caught the bug that the church was meant to be the best of the noise, the best of the lights, the best of power, the best of strength.

Minnie and my grandfather knew that it was to be the best of friends, the best of held hands, the best of the silence, the best of weakness, the best of the gardens who only through the rhythm of time come due.

Reveling in Uncontrol

If we were to look down on these quarantine days from inside a movie or a book, the foreignness of it all would shock the senses. Grocery stores aisles that are one-way so you don’t come in contact with other shoppers, half-the-world under some kind of shelter-in-place. Of course, that foreignness is shaking through our nervous systems, our physical tensions, our complex, and diverse coping mechanisms. Transforming us, whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not.

The post-industrial world was built for illusions of control. The digital world built to bring speed, efficiency, and neurological addiction to that control. We have spent generations building the most unspiritual world imaginable, and we are just now seeing creation’s rebellion. Storms we cannot contain, viruses we’ve never seen, societal ills like racism and poverty revealed as more like code than a glitch.

And the world stopped. The spin of our accumulated industrial and digital prowess revealed as frail in the face of the bigger questions we cannot answer.

And we are at home. We are on our front porches at the intersection of First and Market. We are watching the world. There are no church rock concerts to attend. We are waiting on the strawberries. Mine went in the ground yesterday. And so we will wait, for a future we cannot demand, rush, or control.

We are all Minnie Pruisner now. And we are the better for it.

The following is a poem you may have seen, written by Kathleen O’Mara. Let it be our prayer:

And people stayed at home
And read books
And listened
And they rested
And did exercises
And made art and played
And learned new ways of being
And stopped and listened
More deeply
Someone meditated, someone prayed
Someone met their shadow
And people began to think differently
And people healed.
And in the absence of people who
Lived in ignorant ways
Dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
The earth also began to heal
And when the danger ended and
People found themselves
They grieved for the dead
And made new choices
And dreamed of new visions
And created new ways of living
And completely healed the earth
Just as they were healed.

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I write regular mediations for finding the presence of Jesus in the everyday. You can get them in your inbox, no outbound links required.