For the past several months, I’ve gathered, cracked, and shelled walnuts. Our trees are now big enough to bear a crop, but the trees aren’t large enough to harvest by machine so we hand gathered this year. Walking the orchard with buckets and bags picking up the nuts. Gleaning… as the poor gleaned in Biblical times. I love candied walnuts and made a ton for Christmas, which worked out well since buying presents this year felt like parting the Red Sea. It took an act of God to tuck gifts for our eight kids (in case this number throws you, I’m counting Drew, our son-in-law) under the tree. So thankful for that unexpected refund check in the mail, and for Faith Christian’s teacher’s Christmas bonus in December.

Preparing the walnuts was a labor of love our sons didn’t appreciate, especially when I put the boys to work gathering and cracking nuts with Oma and me. My mom “Oma” never stops working. She also made jam and dried fruit all autumn, perfect for Christmas sharing. Childhood memories came back to me. Those long ago days of gathering and cracking walnuts with my German grandmother. Now my children with their half-German grandmother doing the same. This returning to farm life suits us. It feels like coming home. Yet, I have so much to learn on the farm. Like when you cut a walnut in half a certain way a heart appears.  

A perfect heart that set me back on my heels when I saw it on Pinterest. Made me gather my breath because God pointed out the tender heart of the walnut to me as I prayed in the orchard.

Just as you are here after the heart of the walnut, I am after your tender heart, God impressed on my thoughts as I walked the quiet orchard, picking up the nuts, bundled against the cold, with a persistent wind nudging the leaves off the trees and sliding the warm tears from my face.

I’d gone to the orchard after an encounter with my dad that left me grieving. He’d gotten angry over Luke’s car, once Dad’s midlife crisis car, and though it was really his grandson he was angry at, Opa (as we call my dad) took his anger out on me. Cussing me and the car in the church parking lot where Luke had left the Supra broke down for two days. Up until my own breakdown, I’d always been able to handle being cussed out. Never in a church parking lot before, but 2013 was a strange year. I grew up with that sort of thing… the cussing… but something profound happened to me after my breakdown. I discovered I no longer had a shell. I guess it shattered in my breakdown, and now I am tender with people. Even when I don’t want to be tender because I was raised to be tough. My dad always says, “You have to be tough in this world,” and I believed that all my life until my breakdown. But my toughness is gone and I’m struggling to adjust to this tender, new person I’ve become.

So I’m in the church parking lot listening to my dad with his cussing frightening the crows off the church lawn. And I’m hurting as my dad’s harsh words land on me with the crows flying away. Those words pound my heart like rocks. And I’m missing my old shell. That thing that used to keep me tough. And I’m praying to God as my dad curses me, “Why can’t I have my shell back? I really need my shell! I feel like a naked turtle here. Can a turtle even live without a shell on this earth?”

I love my dad. He’s really a special man. But he has a temper, and when he’s angry, cover your ears. And cover your heart. Because ouch.

So after Opa gets the Supra running in the midst of all his cussing, one of Opa’s clients shows up, having tracked Dad down from my dad’s engineering firm, and I see the stress on my dad’s face, his seventy-one-year-old Opa face. And I see how hard he works to give his family a good life. And I see the frustration that his sixteen-year-old grandson is at happyland in school, a private, Christian school all fishbowl safe. Luke oblivious to the fact that someone else has to fix that fast, old car Luke drives too hard. And my toddler Cruz is fussing and kicking and pounding his car seat in the rear of my old Suburban as I drive out of the church parking lot begging God for my shell back. Because not only is my shell gone, my eyes have lost their scales too. Since my breakdown, I now see through other’s shells, into other wounded hearts, and it adds to this pain because I see my dad’s pain. And I see the heart of my dad’s anger is that he fears losing his grandson. And I scream for my shell back.

It seems like my pain, all this pain, but this isn’t really mine. This collective pain I share with mankind. This human condition that we all experience pain.

Please contact me if you have no pain. No wounds. If you don’t have an old hurt or a new hurt or a son’s hurt or a daughter’s hurt or a parent’s hurt (my father-in-law is dying of cancer right now. That sure hurts) or a spouse’s hurt. Or a friend’s hurt.

Someone in your life is hurting right now, and chances are it’s you. And not just you, but a dozen other people you hold dear. And you watch the news, and your heart also hurts for people you don’t even know. Human beings you see suffering on the news. So you settle down into your shell and you turn the channel and watch American Idol or Sunday Night Football or NCIS (a show I’ve never heard of until I googled the top shows America watched in 2013, and NCIS was number 1 among total viewers even over football).

And the only thing that makes sense to me these days are the wounds on Jesus’ hands. The Lord’s pain on the cross. Because so often our wounds don’t make sense. People suffer every day and sometimes for no good reason at all. And in steadfast Christian faith, I blame Adam and Eve for this suffering. That old, original sin that no longer seems so original with modern day folks tossing out their old-fashioned Bibles and saying Adam and Eve were a myth. Just a fairy tale like Ring Around the Rosie. Well, this happy little nursery rhyme refers to the Black Plague that killed over twenty-five million people in the fourteenth century. Ring around a rosie is that round, red rash that is the first symptom of this dreaded disease. And the first symptom that killed Adam and Eve was unbelief. “Did God really say,” the devil whispered to Eve…

Unbelief.

And coming and going, I hear unbelief all around. Ringing round and round a rosie. Unbelief screaming for a shell. Any shell. Give me a shell! For the love of God give me a shell!

And then it happens. The love of God coming down to me in that cold, quiet orchard after my dad’s harsh words have wounded me. God’s love settling as a dove settles in the trees and starts to coo. The Spirit cooing. And wooing in that winter orchard as I pick up walnuts and place them in my heavy bucket. All those hard walnuts I intend to crack wide open.

And God says to me, “Just as you are here gathering the tender heart of the walnut to give away in love to those you love, I gather your tender heart to me. I gather you up and I tuck your tender, little heart into the vast tenderness of my Eternal Heart and you are safe. And you are loved. And you are free.

I’m not giving you back your shell. I’ve broken that hard thing off of you and you’re not getting it back. Your protection is in Me now.

And I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares the LORD, and I will be the glory in her midst. Zechariah 2:5.

The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. Psalm 18:2.

The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him– my father’s God and I will exalt him. Exodus 15:2.