Chickens don’t have large talons. Not the hens, anyways, which is all we have. But they have something even better: Sarah Beth. SB is eight now and as determined a child as ever. Even before she could speak, she’d stare at you with her big blue eyes and point at whatever she wanted (usually food). She’s a natural teacher, and her favourite subject is How to Hold a Chicken, which she conducts classes in whenever she finds a willing student.

Our laying hens have been SB’s special companions, as she has no other pets. She’s domesticated her favourite, Baby Blondie, to sit in her lap without being restrained. Often I see her striding across the yard with a chicken tucked under her arm, lecturing it on proper behaviour. One might say she’s adept at fowl play.

But Sarah Beth does more than just play. A couple weeks ago, she was outside the chicken coop when she saw something emerging from a hole beneath the cement foundation. As she later told me, she wondered if it was a racoon or a squirrel, then realized—”It’s a mink!”

In England the fox is the big, bad chicken thief. We’re fox-free on Vancouver Island, but the mink is our primary poultry poacher. Have you ever seen a mink? They’re adorable, with sleek black fur and neat little faces. Once when I was kayaking down nearby Todd Inlet with a friend, a mink followed us along the shore for quite awhile, flickering over rocks and stopping to stare at us. They’re intelligent animals, related to stoats and weasels. Adorable, but cruel in nature’s amoral way. They drink chickens’ blood and it sends them into a frenzy until they kill the whole flock at once.

So when Sarah Beth saw it was a mink, she knew she had to act fast. “Because the chickens are like, my best friends,” she explained to me. She stomped on the mink’s foot and held it there as she shouted, “Help! I can’t hold it much longer!” Eventually the mink escaped, but chicken was off the menu that night.

As the world spirals into panic, I think of Sarah Beth and the mink. If an eight-year-old girl can love a flock of (rather dense) hens so much, how much greater must God’s love be for us? We can’t say that we or those we love will escape from this pandemic unscathed, whether in health, finances, or relationships. The danger is real. But Jesus promises to be with us even through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He sees the threat, he holds our lives, and he will lead us until we come to still waters at last.

That sinking feeling…

I was moving boxes in my friend’s emptying apartment when I got the text: “What’s the soup tonight? For 25?”

Uh oh. The soup! I’d forgotten all about the soup. It was our lecture night, normally on a Friday but because of our speaker’s schedule, on a Saturday instead. Saturday is my day off, which meant I wouldn’t be back at L’Abri until the evening. I usually supervise a lot on Friday, so I hoped everything would run smoothly without me. Because of our guest speaker, a prof at nearby Trinity Western University, we expected a high turnout for our dinner and even more for the lecture. But I’d forgotten to plan a Friday soup when I made our weekly grocery list! So, there was Clarke, rushing out to the store to buy potatoes and cream so they could whip something together.

When I got home a half hour before dinner, Clarke called me into their kitchen. “Look what we forgot,” he said.

On the counter were the sourdough loaves I’d shaped the day before, so Clarke could bake them the next day. They were completely raw and only half-risen. “Well, we can’t bake these,” I said. So, there was Clarke, rushing out to the store to buy sourdough bread.

I went over to the student kitchen. Our helpers pointed to the double sink. It was full of water and wouldn’t drain. Chung Seong got out the toilet plunger but no luck. By the time the first guests started to arrive, three men were working on the sink, and water was pouring into a bucket beneath. Thirty people at dinner and no sink to wash the dishes! I burnt my hand on a pot, said something not too nice, and couldn’t even cool my fingers in the sink.

Ten more people showed up for the lecture; so many some had to sit in the room next door. In the kitchen, water started overflowing from the bowl onto the floor. I started bailing water outside into the rain. Clarke turned off the water, but then—no bathroom for forty people. The washing machine shut off too—with clean clothes I desperately needed locked inside. And our speaker’s computer wouldn’t work with our projector!

“Disillusioned again!” That’s what a friend from Southborough L’Abri always says when these sorts of things happen. But, she means it as a good thing. She’s referencing the book Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer writes:

The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. …He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

What if the sink hadn’t overflowed? What if the sourdough had turned out perfectly? What if I hadn’t forgotten the soup? It couldn’t have been worse timing for these things to happen. Everyone saw us in the midst of chaos; there was no smooth sailing. But that’s the truth of human community. It’s a stormy sea we can’t calm by ourselves. We can’t escape it by building an unsinkable ship or imagining the whitecaps away. We need the One who speaks the word of peace to even the wind and waves.

So often we think we just need the right plan, the right system, to make community work, whether it’s a household or a federal government. Build a better wheel, and the car will run. But how many utopias have come and gone? How many times have each of us loved our ideals more than the reality? A better system is no bad thing, but it can’t change a heart. Only God does that. And He seems to begin by dis-illusioning us, waking us up from the dreams we’ve starred in, our glistening utopias. That’s where we meet grace, which does what the human never can.

So, where the cracks and seams show and you wish it could all just be a little more shiny and smooth, remember that disillusionment is where Christ’s community service begins.

~Liz

Though November is long gone, I wanted to share a story one of our helpers/a good friend of Canadian L’Abri wrote during that term in the shared journal. I love how she conveys the experience and wonder of hiking on the west coast in all weather.
-Liz

Hiking in Sooke
(shared with permission by Emily Germain)

Liz said that the hike through East Sooke Park only took three hours when she did it. Evan, Carlo, and Emily figured this gave them plenty of time to get back for high tea at 6:00, starting out in the cold drizzle around 12:30.

The trail was a beautiful, winding journey, scrambling over rocks close to the coast, overlooking the crashing waves and gazing across the water to the Olympic mountain range on the other side. The air was warm once the rain stopped and the wind was exhilarating. Sometimes the trail would leave the coast and hack its way through thick stands of salad and fairy groves of dim, moss-hung trees. Everything was alive with damp. Deep-cut chasms in the rock boomed with heavy water. Evan stopped to give a geology lesson.

It was getting late, though. Around 3:00, they had only covered about half the trail. They were hiking fast, and were beginning to wonder if Liz had underestimated the trail, or if she maybe had hidden super powers. They realized that they would be hiking in the dark, with the sun setting around 4:30.

The new goal became reaching Beechey Head, a lookout 2-3 km from the end, before sunset. They decided not to rest until they got there. When they finally climbed the rocks to the “couch” ledge and sat down, the rain had started again. But they were so happy and tired and alive that they didn’t care. They ate snacks and Evan made tea with his little stove. Emily sent Liz a text to let her know that they would be late for high tea. The Olympic range across the water disappeared into the rain and the gathering night.

They hiked onward with their phones as flashlights, stumbling over roots and rocks, staying close to each other and their wavering beams of light.

Finally, finally, there was the parking lot in the dark, and there was Bryan coming to meet them with another light. And then homeward for food and games with everyone else. And Liz sent a text to her hiking buddy to find out how long they had actually taken to do the trail.

It was six hours, actually.
So there you have it.

Last Friday morning I got up to go for a run before breakfast. I’d checked the weather the night before and was expecting clouds, but no rain. When I looked out my window, I saw this:

Please understand, Canada doesn’t always look like this. In fact, this part of Canada looks like this maybe two days every year. Vancouver Island has the most temperate climate in the whole country, which means a lot of rain year round. What it doesn’t mean is much snow, and especially not snow in November.

I squealed, and pulled on a toque (Canadian lingo for “knitted winter hat”.) Downstairs, three students who’d also got up to run stared out the windows, wondering. One student, from Uganda via Tennessee, said, “Liz, I thought you said it never snows here!”

The students went to a breakfast of eggs and toast, and I went out for a snow walk. Our hens looked unimpressed with the scattering of snow, inedible manna in their coop. But our helper’s Angora rabbits were nice and cozy in their natural insulation.

On Old West Saanich Road, which runs behind our property, snow dusted farm stands, making little hats on small pumpkins and bundles of garlic. I met an elderly Dutch man collecting the newspaper from his mailbox. “Does the paper say anything about snow?”
I asked him.

He glanced at the front page. “No.”

“I can’t believe this. It wasn’t even in the forecast; I checked last night.”

“Ah. Well, in ’85 it was up to here.” He motioned to his waist. “And in ’96, the same.”

As I continued down the country road, I saw how the wet snow brought out the details of many things I’d never noticed walking there before: ivy on a brick pillar, bare branches, an old plough. Last winter at Southborough L’Abri, Mary Frances prayed thanks for how snow reminds us of Jesus washing our sins white as snow. I thought of that gasp of wonder when we see the year’s first snow. Fresh snow transforms what we think we know of the world. But it doesn’t just hide the roadside muck, it brings out the beauty of what’s already there.

To be transformed isn’t to lose the particularity of who we are, or to experience life as bleached and bland. It’s to awaken to the delight of how all was made to be.

Back at L’Abri, in the kitchen we cooked chilli, cornbread, plum crisp, and bread, and listened to Christmas carols. A hummingbird rested on the feeder, even in the cold. The sun came over the trees and filled the snow with light.

—Liz

I always thought Apple Day at English L’Abri sounded like a lot of fun. Canadian L’Abri got its tradition of applesauce in oatmeal from English L’Abri, but we never had apple trees on Bowen Island. Turns out, processing apples is no joke! We have four apple trees on the new property, all mysterious varieties ripening in their own ways and times. Some are small and blushing, others are big and light green. We’ve been making apple squares, apple crisp, and apple pie, but most of the apples are for the canner. This week the students peeled and sliced mounds of apples, partly using our faithful Apple Wizard (I’m not sure what it’s actually called), an ominous-looking, old-timey gadget that peels, cores and slices the apple in one fell swoop.

While a group of students piled the kitchen table with apple debris, Dana and I went outside to try our hand at braiding garlic. We’d inherited a bed of both softneck and hardneck garlic. Softneck has pretty, globular tops with little seeds, while hardneck has drooping, bulbous heads. When I dug up the garlic, the softneck cloves were smaller with more fragile wrappers.

The garlic wasn’t looking the most edible when it came out of the ground, bearded with scraggly roots and coated in dirt. I put the two bundles in the shed to cure for a week, though I think it was pretty cured already after overstaying its welcome in the garden bed.

Dana and I carefully cleaned the bulbs but it was hard to avoid breaking some of them off their stalks or accidentally peeling off the wrappers. We soaked the stalks of the ones that survived to make them more pliable.

Then we attempted to braid. What you don’t see here is how we had to keep looking at the internet instructions, taking apart our braids, and wrangling the garlic into submission. Though we tried to secure the bundles with twine, the stalks had minds of their own and put up a fight. Sometimes, the bulbs popped right off the stem and made a clean getaway.

(This is an example of how NOT to braid garlic… I had to disassemble it soon after.)

Yet we were victorious. Finally we had some handsome braids to hang in the corners of the kitchen, to give the place a hobbity feel. Though we’re far from being farm folk and find ourselves a bit bewildered at these novel tasks, there’s also great joy in learning new things. It’s wonderful to see the work of our hands in such an obvious way, and it’s a gift to have this property ready for harvest so soon after we arrived. Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up this weekend and we have so much to be thankful for: a good term with lovely students, and a homey place to welcome them in.

Garlic applesauce, anyone?

Now is the summer of our content, to misquote Shakespeare. We’re busy on this beautiful property, building a big chicken coop in the old goat pasture, painting rooms “candle” hue, and picking blackberries and apples. When we have students, we’ll serve them applesauce with oatmeal, as English L’Abri does and as we did on Bowen Island. The library is still crammed with boxes of books, reminding us of the many hours our faithful friends spent packing us up on Bowen. Even in the busyness, we’re joyful every day over what we’ve been given.

It once seemed impossible to sell our old property. Then it seemed impossible to pack up three houses and move to a new island. It seemed very impossible to find a property here, something we could afford and that would suit our needs. But the God of the impossible has made it possible. L’Abri is so ordinary in so many ways, full of mundane details of cooking and cleaning and learning patience with each other. We have no light shows or smoke machines. “If it ain’t broke, it ain’t L’Abri,” says one worker. From those early days in Switzerland, L’Abri has always been an unlikely story. It’s a fragile work upheld only by God’s faithfulness. The extraordinary shows up in ordinary ways. But this property is a more obvious example of the extraordinary: a “signpost”, as Edith Schaeffer would say, that we can look back on in uncertainty as a reminder of God’s provision.

We’ll be ready to welcome guests September 13th, something which seemed impossible a year ago. This property is a gift to care for, and each student will be a gift, too. Give thanks with us for all God has done, for the long prayers He’s answered, and for the shelter He’s provided here.

Welcome to our new home! We are so thankful for this place. We’ve set up Liz’s space; the rest of the stuff is migrating slowly. Lots more work to do, and many hands needed. You and all your kin are welcome to help!

In the fall, a new book (The Road Back to You) arrived at Southborough L’Abri about the Enneagram, a system that attempts to categorize people into nine different personality types. It spawned a flurry of support groups, stricken looks as one read about one’s fatal flaws, and one student rushing into the library with an old copy of The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective and exclaiming, “It’s a disaster! I think I might be a Seven instead of a Two! It’s just like when I thought I was in Gryffindor instead of Ravenclaw!”

The Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs tests often get a lot of press among students at L’Abri. We like diagnosing each other, then laughing, “Oh don’t worry, he won’t stay to help with dishes. He’s not a Two. Only Twos like us are so loving and giving.”

I love sorting out how people can be so different and trying to figure out why we think and respond the way we do. I like gazing at my own quirks and motivations swirling around in a misty jar and squinting at their shapes. I always feel proud when I can correctly “type” someone on my first guess.

All of these tools can be helpful to understand each other and ourselves. We might be able to lasso some of the free-floating bits that have puzzled us for years. And we may see that God has created people to be different, so we don’t have to change to be like everyone else, or change everyone else to be like us.

The problem is when personality tests narrow rather than broaden us. It’s so appealing to think the perfect relationship or a 1-2-3 self-improvement is just a book (or, for a small fee, an online test) away. It’s also appealing to imagine we can justify all our behavior by assigning it four letters or a number. These sorts of systems can easily become an attempt to control ourselves and our relationships: “Well, I’d never be friends with an Eight, or date an ESTP.”

We can think we have it all figured out.

During one L’Abri term, each morning some students would be talking about Myers-Briggs and at night they’d still be saying, “That’s such an INFJ thing to do!”

But if you know my letters (or number) it doesn’t mean you truly know me. If I know my own number it doesn’t mean I truly know myself.

“What a piece of work is a man!” says Prince Hamlet. “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

Shakespeare somehow understood so much about human nature without even knowing his Enneagram type. Francis Schaeffer wrote that each of us is a “glorious ruin.” We can pick ourselves apart in an attempt to either be only glorious, or only a ruin. But we are both. Hamlet saw primarily the ruin, but in Christ, we see the glory of being made in God’s image. And God’s image is no simple thing to parse out.

The Psalmist wrote that each of us is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” We’re not just “a piece of work” in the modern sense: a mess to untangle. We’re pieces worked by God, and because of that, we’re made with glory and wonder. We’re also marked by the ruin of the Fall. So whatever our personality flaws, we need to recognize our own sin and deal with it before God, not before the pages of a book.

When we approach each other, we should be aware that there is something fearful and wonderful about the Other that we can never possess or control, just as we can never know ourselves fully. As we spend time with ourselves, each other, and the God who transforms us, we change. We should expect to be surprised. We need God’s own revelation to know each other and ourselves. When we try to understand what being human is all about, let’s do so with a humility that remembers the God who knit us together in the womb, whose thoughts outnumber the grains of sand, and who searches and knows us completely, as no ten-minute quiz ever could do.

—Liz

The house at Butchart Gardens, near our new property

Spring at Butchart Gardens

Sunken garden at the famous Butchart Gardens

Welcome to the all-new Canadian L’Abri blog. Hope springs eternal, and this spring’s hope is that we will regularly update this blog. We’re very excited that we’ve finally found a property on Vancouver Island after a long search. When we move there in July, it will be almost two years to the day since we moved from Bowen Island. We’ve seen God’s faithfulness in sustaining us through this period of waiting, and we’re so grateful for the very good thing He’s provided for us. We look forward to welcoming our first guests in September! The summer will be a busy time of preparing the property to be a shelter for those who come. If you live nearby, you’re always welcome to come grab a paintbrush! And if you don’t live close but want to stay with us, you’re welcome. We anticipate many good meals, long discussions, and games of volleyball in the yard. Come join us!

(Photos are of Butchart Gardens, a few minutes’ drive from our new property.)