Maple Syrup

This past Saturday, on what was a beautiful Spring-like day, I found myself doing a bit of yard clean up while the kids played. I gathered branches, pine needles and dry leaves that littered the yard, and burned them in our outdoor fire pit that we use for campfires. After a while I moved over to a tree swing to give my youngest daugther some pushes. That's when I noticed a branch on one of the maple trees nearby that needed to be taken down. I went into the garage and grabbed my extending tree saw and cut it off. Almost immediately, sap started dripping out of the cut. I was shocked by just how much was coming out.

Now growing up in New England, I know about maple syrup. I've been to a Vermont sugar house and seen the steam vapors pouring out. I've seen the trees with their buckets and taps and tubing lines. But I guess I had no idea just how much sap comes out of a maple when the sap starts to run. With my kids' help, we grabbed some buckets from the sandbox, and started collecting sap. 24 hours later we had about 3 gallons full. On Monday morning, I started boiling it down.

I didn't really know how much syrup I'd get. I looked online and found out I needed to keep boiling it until the water content was mostly gone, and the resulting "syrup" reached 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. It took a while, and I even added more sap that had gathered throughout the day, but by 9:00pm last night, that 7 degrees above the boiling temperature of water was reached, and I had 2 cups of (Grade A?) pure maple syrup. How fun to see the kids enjoying it this morning on their french toast before school. I'm hooked. And next Spring I'm going to really tap the 4 old maple trees and see how much I can make.

I also have felt a connection to Lent through this process, as I've reflected on how much of me needs to be boiled off before I can get down to a more pure, undiluted faith. How much refinement does my faithwalk need, and how much Grade A is there really within me?

Refinement is never easy, but the end result is always sweet.

Lenten Math

Most people I know approach Lent with a sense of foreboding. Often, thoughts are consumed by what must be given up (usually something related to sweet, yummy food), or what symbolic sacrifice must be made. While giving up something for Lent can be very helpful in our faith walk, I have found that instead of subtracting something from my life for Lent, I am better served in my journey of faith during Lent, by adding something.

For me over the years that has meant praying the Daily Office (well...I must admit only some of the hours). Or lectio divina. Or The Jesus Prayer. Or silence. I've added reading daily scriptures, or used a book like Richard Foster's Devotional Classics. A year or two ago I started using www.sacredspace.ie and it became a daily part of my yearlong faith walk with Christ, and continues to be so to this day. In each case, each addition that I added to my life during Lent prepared me in powerful ways for Holy Week to come, and impacted my faithwalk deeply for the longhaul. And isn't that the point?

Math was always one of my better subjects in school, and even as a kid I found addition to come more naturally than subtraction. When it come to my own faith, and the season of Lent, addition still seems to better suit me.

Maybe it will you too.