A Call To The Remnant

Last year, in the midst of chemo, my house became unbearable. Nausea was a problem I never overcame for the several months of treatment and every smell made my stomach turn. I just had to be outside so I would take refuge on our deck—a south-facing suntrap where the fresh air seemed like heaven itself. Out there I could breathe again. Out there the warmth, the breeze, and the open sky were gifts. The Spirit of God would literally rest upon me. This was a place for me where sky and earth seemed to become one.

I told a friend I felt as though I were taking a Masterclass in Grace. Because the Spirit of God would rest on me out there, even as nausea raged through my body. I forced myself to walk a block each day, slow, steady, determined, and then I’d return to my lounger on the deck. Between me and the heavens were trees full of birds I had never noticed before. Dozens of tiny frenetic little guys. Great joy filled me as I watched their antics. How could I have not noticed these wee fellas before A thousand songs in the branches.

I was strangely alive.

I sat there for hours, looking up.

That was the lesson He pressed into me:

Lift up your eyes, Frank and see where your help comes from.

Even while chemo ravaged my body, grace flooded my spirit.

Behind my house is a field owned by a church. I have always loved that openness, the privacy, the flow of wildlife, the quiet beauty of it. During that season, I watched a BBC documentary on rewilding, taking a low-yield field, restoring native plants, planting indigenous trees, letting the land become what it was meant to be again. The transformation was stunning. Butterflies returned. Birds returned. Life returned.

Somehow I felt like that rewilded field. Early stages for sure. There are no fences in the fields God restores. He works in wide open spaces. There are no straight edges in nature, nothing to tell you where the old man-made boundaries once stood.

No manicured edges to remind you of the places trimmed by the hands of men. Only the quiet rise of something wild and free beginning to grow again.

That show stirred something deep in me. In the flush of my enthusiasm

I contacted the church.

“How about you rewild your field,” I suggested, with great enthusiasm. “It would save you lots of money, you would not have to mow it.” And “you would be helping the environment.” I was hoping to appeal to something, anything. He explained to me that the city wont let them grow the grass over a certain height.

I called the city, found grants, stirred possibilities, sent the information to the church…….and then, life and treatment and circumstances pulled the thread from my fingers, and the idea slipped away into the quiet. Like many great stirrings, it got swallowed up by circumstances that press in and with great tyranny, demand your attention.

A year and a half later, just last week, I walked through my back gate which leads to the field, which leads to a familiar path, the trail where so many prayers have risen like incense. Many of you have seen the prayer videos and the pictures I have taken along my narrow path. But this day I saw poles driven across the field, a line, a boundary, dividing the ground in half. Close to my house. Too close.

I told my wife, “Something is being built in the field”

We were dismayed at the thought of construction in our peaceful oasis in the back. Some parking lot perhaps that would be illuminated at night like a stadium?

Then the neighbor,the keeper of all neighborhood knowledge, you know the one (the guy who would complain to the church if they did not cut their grass in time) told me what was going on:

They are rewilding the field!!!

The aeration, the markings, the disturbance, it was preparation for wildflowers.

Boy Scouts were involved. A grant had been given.

The city approved the letting-go of their height rules..

Our field will very soon rise up and bloom.

Then I realized that the enthusiasm for my field, in the midst of my chemo with the Spirit of the Lord resting on me was Spirit breathed. And what He breathes upon springs to life……in it’s time.

I had forgotten, but the Lord had not.

A thought born in weakness, planted in sickness, had been carried by God until its season came.

Wildflowers were coming to my back door.

God had not forgotten.

A memory from early in my walk with the Lord returned to me.

I once lived near manicured neighborhoods, gardens shaped by tape-measures and string lines, flowers placed with military precision. Beautiful, yes… but controlled, tamed, measured. As I walked that neighborhood and surveyed these impressive gardens in these huge houses, the Holy Spirit whispered in my ear “look the other way.”

Across the street was a culvert beside an open field, and around that culvert grew thousands of wildflowers, flung by the wind, seeded by the unseen hand of God. No symmetry. No order. Only life, and that more abundantly.

And the Lord said to me then:

“Look, Frank. This is what I want for you.”

Not the regimented garden of man’s expectations, his denominatons, his preconceived notions…….

but the freedom of a wildflower field—

growing where His wind carries me,

rooted where His hand plants me.

Now, all these years later, and after chemo last year, after grace under the open sky, after the birds and the sunlight and the prayers in the field……it comes full circle.

The field behind my house is becoming what God once whispered into the soil of my soul.

A place of wildflowers.

A place of return.

A place of restoration.

And I know now:

I have been rewilded.

This is where I am.

Not in the place of always striving for perfection…

Not in the place of certainty.

But in the tender, trembling ground of becoming.

I am standing in the field between who I was

and who He is forming me to be.

The soil is soft.

My soul, undone.

My life, waiting like a seed beneath the surface —

buried, broken, but not forgotten.

In order to restore God has to reclaim. He has to undo the work of man. He has to carefully remove all of their marks and then the allows the ground to lie fallow. And then the wind begins to blow and the seed fall upon the prepared ground, good ground, ready to receive.

And when God restores, beauty returns.

Color returns.

Freeness returns.

The wildness of grace returns.

The butterflies come home.

Life begins to inhabit the field again.

When the Lord returns us to our true beginning…….

the place He dreamed for us before we were shaped by the world…..

something magnificent unfolds.

The complexity of life falls away.

The garden grows without our striving.

For in a rewilded field, the hand of man is no longer the gardener.

The Lord Himself tends the soul.

He sends the rain.

He calls forth the flowers.

He arranges the seasons.

He brings beauty from earth we thought was barren.

And now I can see it. He has been rewilding me all along. Slowly, surely, and my unawareness of it, up till now, only makes it all the more the Masters work.

He has taken the field of my life,

cut square by the expectations of organized religion,

shaped by the hands of others,

emptied by suffering,

and He is restoring it

to the original design He designed for me

before I ever took a breath. Now the calling is to us all, come off that road and walk through the gate into the open field that leads to the high mountain passes and wildflower alpine meadows. He is restoring His Church, He is rewilding it.

And what He does is marvelous.

What He does is holy.

What He does is beautiful to behold.

I am being rewilded — and the work of His hands is wonderful to behold.