from The Anglican Digest, WHITSUNTIDE 2000
To summarize last year's experience: As Patient Wife and I watched the annual New Year's Day concert from Vienna we lost power at Hillspeak and remained without for several days, storing our frozen food on the front porch where the temperature ranged from 00 to 100. Within a few days, power was restored and life went back to normal until the 8th of January when an overnight ice storm isolated us and prevented all of SPEAK's employees from getting to work at all. All, that is, but the writer who, with two cats for company, ad the Twin Barns to himself.
Contrast that experience with what I have written for the Book Club's Springtidings for this year:
"New Year's Day 2000 dawned beautifully bright and wonderfully warm at Hillspeak. The night before, Patient Wife and I had watched, on television, the new year march across the globe from the islands of the Pacific to the fireworks in Beijing, to the sun rising over the Egyptian desert, to that incredibly spectacular display on the Eiffel Tower, and then across the Atlantic to more fireworks on the extreme eastern seaboard of the North American continent, to yet more fireworks on the Mall in Washington. It was a stirring view of God's created world.
"Once we had satisfied ourselves that the dire predictions about Y2K were not going to leave us cold and dark, at least not at Hillspeak, we bedded down for the night and slept blissfully to awake to a day that easily could have been in late spring or early autumn. It was the antithesis of New Year's Day 1999. As I write this in late January we are now snowbound, but I know that in a few days the snow will be gone and in a few weeks our trees and shrubs will begin to shoot out their leaves. God's created world, whether it be the Pacific Islands or the mainland of Asia or the Arkansas Ozarks, follows a pattern '...a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.'
"At Hillspeak we believe the season and the time are just a little bit better. Come and see for yourself."
805 CR 102 - EUREKA SPRINGS AR 72632-9705
PHONE: 501-253-9701 FAX: 501-253-1277 E-MAIL:speak@speakinc.org
