Speaker 0:11

This is Judy Hall and the End of the World. A Christian fable. I decided to tell this story in episodes. Mostly for my family and good friends. So they would know about me when I'm gone. So they could have this electronic record to keep forever, should they be interested in doing so. And should someone step up and pay the monthly subscription fees. I wanted them mostly to understand how I came to love God and understand that God loves me. And I finally decided that the best way to tell that story would be through the fable of my life. So this might jump around. But it's my story. I wanted to tell my own story. My story begins in the middle of the country. In a land that's mostly flat. In a land that's marked by cornfields. The cornfields are important because as I look back and I think of the oceans of cornfields of my childhood, how it looked like an ocean over the hills. How people talked about the corn being knee-high by the Fourth, and how my grandmother said you can hear the corn grow. And you can, you know. I think that's the first time I met God. I didn't know him then. He knew me. But I didn't know him. I just knew Wonder. Wonder at the corn. Wonder at the place my place in the corn. And on dark nights you could indeed hear it grow. Makes a tiny crackling sound. The wind in the corn makes an even more distinctive sound because as the leaves of the plants rustle, they make a very distinctive sound in the wind. Kind of like hands clapping. Faintly. And when I learn more about the story of corn, about how it grows, how it's tended carefully to by the farmers, and how it's harvested. And how in the fall, when those fields lay fallow, it feels like the very earth itself is on the edge of disaster when it's only on the edge of snow. So God came first as the cornfield. I lived in the country then. And Judy Hall and I were summertime friends. We played in the fields and the pastures and barns, waited in the creeks, caught butterflies, chased lightning bugs at dusk, went to a one-room school together, where the teacher brought out cold, fresh milk in tiny little milk bottles at lunchtime. When it was time for recess, we marched outside in two separate lines, girls on the left, boys on the right, to two separate outhouses. And we spent times on the swings and the trapeze and a rusty old teeter daughter. There's one more way. God showed himself to me. Our family had a big sloping lawn. And in the summer times when the weather was nice, my father would spread an old sleeping bag out on the lawn so we could lay there side by side, the whole family, and he'd point out the stars to us, the constellations, the Milky Way that yes was visible on an Iowa prairie. Not like it is in the desert in the outpack. And our own vision of it. There wasn't much light pollution then. So I begin to fall in love with God before I had a name for Him. I begin to fall in love with that night sky and all its wonder and all its beauty. The colors I couldn't recreate with my crayolas or paints. More stars than you could count. And they seemed to wrap around us. It seemed to wrap around the cornfields. And that the world was a very safe and very predictable place. Before I called him God, I began to fall in love with him. I learned much about God when I was growing up with Judy Hall. And my sister. That you could jump off the hayloft into a pile of hay unhurt. If only for a minute. We learned mostly that the world was a safe place. Within the farm across the street that held all the wonders of nature, we experienced sunshine and rain, storm clouds. And when the winter came, we went back inside the school. And back inside our houses. Mine to mine, hers to hers. And waited for summer so we could do it all over again. Before I called him God, I began to fall in love with him. Stay tuned for another episode, my family and friends. Thanks for loving me and supporting me. Until that time