Water Hose

A couple Saturdays ago I, along with other friends and family, helped my friends Syd and Jennifer with their grape harvest. After harvesting, dumping them into large white bins and weighing them, we loaded our trucks with the grapes and hauled the ten white bins to a crusher.

It took Syd and I over an hour to feed all the grapes into the crusher while his brother and a friend washed and sanitized the empty bins preparing them for the fermentation of the crushed grapes. When we were done we had seven bins full of heavy mashed grapes. Both Syd and I were wet and sticky with the juice of the crush but there was something elemental and satisfying about the process.

Our methods are more modern but the product is an old one, thousands of years of men and women have gone before us doing much the same as we had. It felt good to step, however briefly, into that long line of winemakers.

Cleaning the mechanized crusher required copious amounts of water and by the time we were done with the clean-up all four of us had squishy wet shoes but none of us seemed to mind. In addition, it was a warm day - mid 90's - so throughout the process we four would periodically drink cool water from the gushing hose used for cleaning the bins.

Driving the 40 minutes back to Syd's I reflected on some of this. I noticed a child-like stirring in my heart. Few things will make you feel more like a child on a hot summer's day like a gushing hose of cool water; playing in it and drinking from it. That is what we'd done, four grown men played with a water hose. My soaked shoes become symbols of long-ago childhood recaptured for a brief time.

I was reminded of Jesus' words about not losing the child-like heart we all have. Life, with its cynical twists and turns, will steal it quickly and we will think ourselves wise to let it be stolen; a mistaken notion of maturity. We want to turn His words about childlikeness into metaphor or symbol but we err in doing this. There are times we simply must return to the child in all of us. This is not childishness without the benefit of lessons learned with maturity. Rather it is childlike awe, joy, playfulness, trust.

That gushing hose on that Saturday afternoon returned me to some of those needed qualities. Maybe more of us need to put our Bibles down and go play in the yard with a water hose more often.