After cleaning my closets, planters, and the window sills, I’ve been thinking about the next book I’d like to write. I thought I could go for months chasing dust bunnies in the house and upsetting the chickens by sprucing up their coop, but I miss writing. The community of writing. Because when I sit down to write, I think of you who read and it’s like we have a relationship, a great friendship, which really we do. Because I want to connect with you. Figure things out with you. Find God with you. I used to have make believe friends when I wrote. My husband was always giving me a hard time. “Are you having fun with your imaginary friends today?” He’d ask when I was working on my novels.

“Yes,” I would answer. “They are being good today.” Or, “No, nobody’s listening to me today. They’re doing what they want to do.”

I know. This is weird. When characters start doing something you didn’t plan. Didn’t approve of. Like when the bad guy becomes a good guy. Or your good guy becomes a joke. And you know he’s not going to cut the mustard as your good guy because your bad guy’s more interesting. More human.

That’s the thing about human. We can all be bad guys.

Tonight my husband hurt my feelings. I know I was the bad guy too, but I’d rather just blame him, and since I’m the one writing here, I can do this. But truthfully, we had this really stupid argument over the crock pot tonight. The crock pot wasn’t the problem, we just talked mean to each other over the top of the crock pot and I didn’t feel like eating the soup I’d made after that. Which was really a shame, that I didn’t taste the soup until everyone else gulped it down, because I forgot several key ingredients so the soup tasted pretty awful and Scott had already made the boys eat it.

Poor boys.

Here is my husband to our sons: “You will eat what the Lord has provided.” Which works out pretty well most of the time since the boys have decided I’m a good cook. But what the Lord provided tonight wasn’t good because God used a bad person to make bad soup. I burnt the bread tonight too, which was sad. I haven’t burnt bread in a long time. But I was mad at Scott, so while making the bread, I went out and attacked the Bermuda grass taking over the back planter, the twelve by twelve patch of Bermuda I’ve been hacking at all day, and while I was out hacking, smoke filled the kitchen.

“What’s burning?” Luke yelled from upstairs. Which was pretty impressive since he was the farthest away from the burning bread. His four younger brothers sat there on their iPads with smoke filling the kitchen and Scott was there pretending nothing was amiss, probably to punish me.

So let’s talk about the next book I’d like to write and why I want to write it and how the idea came to me.

A few days ago, I cleaned out the chicken’s nest boxes. They’ve spent the past few months filling their boxes full of poop instead of eggs. I just don’t get this. Why every winter when you’d think a nice, warm nest would feel really good against your chicken butt, the chickens crap like crazy until the nests are ruined.

Am I like this?

When it’s winter, and the nights are long and dark and cold, do I go and fill my soft place up with poop?

I think maybe I do.

The fight with Scott started because I wanted him to be my soft place today and he wasn’t. My soft place. I called him several times and he didn’t call me back, and then when we met in the kitchen over the crock pot and I asked him why he didn’t call me back because I had something important to ask him, he said he was just too busy to call. Which I knew was a bunch of poop. Because most days, he’s not too busy, and calls me back. And even when he’s too busy, he almost always calls me back. But today he didn’t call, and so he wasn’t my soft place.

This is a rare thing. My husband not returning my calls. Not being my soft place. And what this truly has to do with chickens crapping in their nest boxes, I’m not exactly sure. I’m using the word “crap” today, a term I usually don’t use because I’ve been raising children for over twenty years and I don’t want my little ones to repeat bad words. But yesterday, Scott gave the boys a history lesson on the word “crap”.

According to my history teacher husband the word “crap” in popular culture originated with Thomas Crapper. The most common version of this story is that American servicemen stationed in England during World War I saw his name on the latrines, and started saying, “I’m going to the crapper”. I looked this up, and the word “crap” is actually of Middle English origin and emerged as a term for bodily waste before Thomas Crapper came along, so there you go.

I should tell Scott this, but we made up after our fight over the crock pot, and I don’t want to debate anything else with him tonight. I should probably just google why chickens poop in their nests in winter the same way I googled Thomas Crapper, but I’m too tired right now. I’ll just stick with my main point, the gist of this blog is that I cleaned out all that poop and filled the chicken’s nest boxes with fresh, fragrant hay and a few days later– after several days of warmth and sunshine in California, which probably really did the trick– the chickens thanked me for my labor with two eggs.

Two beautiful eggs Cruz and I ate soft boiled on sour dough toast yesterday morning. You see I can hardly stand store bought eggs now that we have fresh eggs most of the year.

This is the thing about soft places. We need to fill these soft places in our life with hope. Clean out our bad attitudes and the bad words and all the bad crap, hoping God will fill our soft places with new life. With fresh eggs.

I believe you really can farm hope. Just like you can farm grace. I can’t create an egg, but I can create a nice nest box. I can prepare for the eggs. Encourage the chickens with clean, sweet nest boxes. Wait for eggs full of faith that they are coming.

I think I want to write a book about all the hoping we do as human beings.

All our lives we wait in hope. When we’re young, we hope to find someone to love, someone to marry, and build a life with. Or we hope for a great job. Or a great weekend. We hope for babies when the time comes to fill our nest box. We hope our kids grow up good. That they don’t wreck our cars and wreck our marriages and wreck our worlds. We hope our parents age gracefully. That we age gracefully. When we are sick, we hope to get well. Come the new year, we hope to get in shape or turn our lives in a healthy direction. We are a people always hoping.

Where does this come from?

All this hoping?

“I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit” Romans 15:13.

According to the Bible, God is the source of our hope.

Farmers live in hope. They prepare their fields hoping for rain and sunshine. They prepare barns and chicken coops hoping for baby creatures to increase their flocks and herds. They prepare their orchards for harvest. But farmers can’t make eggs and babies and fruit. They can only prepare for this, trusting the God of all hope will fulfill their hopes.