Through the Keyhole

Through the Keyhole

by Doug Bolin

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

It’s been quite an experience coming to California. Art mentioned that we were friends because of a mutual livelihood, and that was farming. And so it’s with anticipation that I’m going to spend a day or two with he and Ginger after camp and really look at rice, you know, down close. See if it is all that he says it is.

I’ve also not seen Art this early in the morning before. Perhaps we need to pray for Ginger because… I was in the army and walked through chow lines and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything quite like Art back there this morning. There we go.

Wonderful breakfast and… The only thing I don’t like about coming here to California is that the counseling doesn’t warn you of everything. And I took a big cup of Pete’s brew down there. And I don’t want you to think once that I don’t close my eyes when I pray, but after one of those you cannot close your eyes. I’ll be lucky if I can close my eyes this afternoon at rest period. My grandfather… Actually my step grandfather was a Swede. And I learned to drink coffee with him and… I tell you, that would bring tears to his eyes. And I thought his was pretty stout because Grandma didn’t even use a percolator. She just boiled it. And you know, it was fine stuff.

I don’t know where Pete came from but… Is that kind of a local thing here? I’m looking right at you, Art, because this is where the buck stops, you know. You’re supposed to be in charge of things here.

I don’t know whether God wants Pete’s stuff or not. We thank You, Heavenly Father, for bringing us to this place and allowing us into Your presence and permitting us to experience You in a new and different way this morning. We’d ask that everything that’s said and done here this morning is for the furtherance of Your kingdom. That all things bring glory to You. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, I told you I’d read you the mail this morning. And I got another one. I think Joy’s beginning to get a suspicion that I read these things to you because she’s not sending me everything that I used to get.

Anyway, the second card here I don’t have to edit too badly. But it’s a rather cute thing. It says, “Oh, how we’ve walked and how we shopped and how we’ve talked the whole way home. The times we spent together have meant so much to me.” And then she writes a personal note here. “This is Monday, the first day, first full day of camp. Who did God speak to go first? I know you are meeting new people, doing great rhythms and creating an art in writing. One thing about CFO is that I can spend the day in CFO along with you. My God is so great, so strong and so mighty. Have a great time. Say hi to Barbara, Art, Ginger and to the rest of you.” She just doesn’t know your names. But I’m beginning to. I’m beginning to know who you are. And that you basically are kind and gentle with this panhandling of Nebraska wheat farmer.

And that’s good because we all need to be treated gently sometimes. Art and I were talking last night a little bit about the scripture for this morning in preparation. I said, I guess I better go back to the cabin and start in and read the Old Testament. We were just joking around. And I try to make Art nervous.

You know, because he acts like he is so in control here. Anybody that is really in control or gives that appearance makes me nervous. And it’s a pretty sad thing too, Art, when the camp mechanic gets more applause than you do in the morning.

I love you, brother, and maybe we can fix that later on. Well, I did go through and read the first chapter of Genesis and then I went to sleep. But there were some interesting things I discovered there. And that was that he closed out in the very last verse of the first chapter of Genesis in saying, “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all His work which He had done in creation.”

What I noted as I read that was the fact that in each day of creation, God looked at what He had done and He said, “It is good.” And it was morning and it was evening and it was whatever day it was. The first day and the second day and the third day and the fourth day.

And we are all basically pretty familiar with what is said in that story of creation. How He created the firmament and it separated the waters on the top and the waters on the bottom and then another day He separated the dry land and He went on to create all the growing things that grew upon it. And then the creatures and the creeping things and the beasts and the cattle and all living things and He put them there. And He looked at it and He said it was good.

And then on the sixth day, why, He started in on a more complicated process, He created you and I. And He put us in the middle of it if you want to picture that. Kind of like we are sitting here in the middle of everything today. You know?

And it is the only statement after He created men and He put them in charge of all of this that it took Him five previous days to create. He put them in charge of it and said this is yours. And then when He stepped back and looked at it, He said it is very good. He changed it just a little. It is very good. I have had theologians tell me He said it was very good because He is just plain tired. But I think it was because He saw it that way. That we were… You know, He had started at the bottom and worked up in His creation and we were the last thing there. And it just wasn’t that we were at the top of the food chain, so to speak. It was because we were very good. Creating His image.

And so it is through CFO that I step into this place and recognize that I am somehow special in God’s eyes. God’s grace fills this entire place here. And it’s just my failure to see Him and sense Him and seek Him that causes the problem in the world.

And I am not here to talk about the problems of the world because they have always been there and always will be. I am talking about me personally and my relationship with God. Am I doing something to set that thing off? No, Paul. Oh, it’s Paul.

Okay, thank you. Just take it away from me probably. Okay. Okay, and it’s… Okay. You like that now? God bless you. Give him a round of applause. I mean, he gets it every time he comes out here. Yeah, and he is outgoing male. We know that. Anyway, the problem in my life was just whenever I didn’t get myself in line with God. Because God was always there. Just like He was there in Genesis.

The reason I like that on… Heaven’s Tableland. Because where I live, Nebraska is not flat. Most… I’ve been talking to a lot of people here and they have this common misconception that Nebraska is flat. Now, who told you this? Did you see one picture in a geography book and it happened to be flat? Or did you actually go there? Huh? You know? Yeah, and some other person I was visiting with once thought I said Alaska, I guess, and they thought it was all frozen tundra.

Well, it isn’t. But it’s really a good place to be from and to go. And I mentioned that last night. But Nebraska, where I live, is the remnants of a high table land that’s then been eroded in centuries more recent, leaving these caprock table lands. There’s valleys and there’s table land. And I happen to live in what’s called Pleasant Valley, which by the natural description is a geographic feature that’s lower than the table land up here. And interspersed in the valley are these remnants that are just like buttes or plateaus. And they have names like 66 Mountain, Devil Hump, and Eagle’s Nest. But my whole view as a child was always from the valley looking out at the table lands. It was natural, as the Psalms say, to lift up my eyes to the hills from whence cometh my strength. I thought God wrote that from right where I stood as a child. And then, of course, singing that song, you see, putting your feet on Heaven’s Tableland, you know, going to a higher place. And if we did things in Pleasant Valley, one of the things was to go into those hills and climb to the top and then look out across. It gives you a different perspective on everything. So that is a geographic feature.

Where I come from in Nebraska, and it’s certainly not flat. Some of it’s sheer straight up hundreds of foot sandstone bluffs. And if any of you have been around Scotts Bluff National Monument on the Oregon Trail, which is about 40 miles north of me, well, you understand that or seen pictures of it. Geographic features that are noted, I guess, around the world. Well, because, well, it wasn’t quite around the world for me, but I was speaking at the Northern California CFO camp here a couple of years ago. And the registrar needed to have some decorations for the doors, you know. Some camps do that when you live in a dormitory and you put your name on this nice picture. And in the process of doing this, she got her little girl to go through old calendars and cut out the pictures.

And when Joy and I got there, they said, “Your room is such and such down the hall, and this person will help you take your stuff down there.” And we went down through this dormitory. And the door was open, nice room with bunk beds. And after we got in, I got to looking around, the picture on my door was Chimney Rock, which is right there next to the Scotts Bluff National Monument, a geographic feature that every pioneer looked for as they came down the Oregon Trail. They were always looking for the Rocky Mountains, but after days and days and days, well, they began to look at the smaller things like Chimney Rock. And it was noted in journals. Many journals had Chimney Rock noted in. This is interesting, clear up here in Northern California, to be having that greet me on my door, a landmark that’s 30 miles away from me. And it certainly is nice to be greeted this way. They must have known.

And I then went and looked at doors along the line, and I thought I’d see other things that were familiar. Absolutely nothing else familiar. There was pictures of Switzerland. There was pictures of Germany. There was pictures of Japan. This calendar, see, had come from who knows where. And there was mine on my door. And I asked the registrar, you know, did you plan this, someone? She said, “No, no, we’re just in a horrible hurry. I gave those to my daughter and said, go here, go stick.” And so, you see, there it was. But the Heaven’s Tableland means a lot to me. And that kind of geographic feature. In 1909, there was a little English school teacher, redheaded English school teacher, from northeastern, or northwestern Colorado, south of Cheyenne, a little town called Nunn, that got a teaching contract. She was 19 years old in Pleasant Valley. And she came up there with no family, just left everything to come there and teach school. Her schoolhouse was up on the Spieth table. And she boarded with the family there. And she taught that one school year. Her name was Grace. And there was a young man that was raising horses. He had no land. He hadn’t homesteaded. He just turned his horses loose on the open, free government land and had quite a herd of horses and some money and a fast team and a buggy.

And Roy courted Grace. And he was smitten by her. But she was not particularly receptive. Although he courted her in a very gentlemanly manner. Took her to all the box socials and the dances and things that went on in those early days of the pioneers.

And along towards the end of the school year she began to sense that she too was drawn to this young man. And so she hung around after school was out. And although she had not received a new teaching contract, it was widely known through the community that this is why she was hanging around. Because she was really beginning to enjoy Roy’s company. She enjoyed going through the community and riding and being seen with him. Riding in this shiny buggy which he washed every time. Kicked the top back at kind of a jaunty angle and the whip stood up out of the socket. And away they went. But as it became clearly evident that she was not going to be a permanent part of that community, she wrote her parents and said she’d be coming back to Nunn, Colorado.

Sometime in August. And so Roy in kind of a parting gesture and realizing he probably would never see this young woman again, offered her to take her the 22 miles into the county seat. Where she would board the mail stage and ride it to Kimball, Nebraska, and then catch the Union Pacific Railroad and make her way back to Nunn, Colorado.

And as his heart was breaking, taking her along, he decided the only way to salve that pain would be to ask her to marry him and just get it out of the way right away. So he turned to her and kissed her tenderly and said, “Grace, would you marry me?” And she said, “Only on the condition that you furnish me with a house and a place to live and quit this monkeying around with the horses and running so wild.”

And he thought that was a pretty fair trade. So he promised her that. And when they got to Harrisburg, they went right to the courthouse. And he got married. The judge married. And he stayed right there in the courthouse and bought a piece of government land, 160 acres for 74 cents an acre. And she could see he was told his end of the story.

And due to the fact he didn’t know anything about her family and made this big step, he decided to ride the mail stage and go down to Nunn and see what her family was really like. And he was right judging her character and the way she was while the rest of the family was pretty much like her. And they hit it off right away.

Communication was pretty slow in those days. And when they got to Nunn, my Grace’s sister, that was about 18 months younger than she, had married her sweetheart on the very same day. And so it was really a big hoopla. They had several dances and several things went on. And the papers wrote it up and said that it was a wonderful celebration. These two couples got married on the very same day, unbeknownst to each other.

And so Roy came back after the week of seeing all the people. And it was a honeymoon of sorts. And built a homestead house upon that 160 acres. And when it was done, he had the help of his friends Charlie and Ebenezer and they built it really fast. Because he wanted to get his bride back up there.

And so he wrote and the mail eventually got there and she did the return trip. And he met her in the buggy and brought her back and there it was. This thing he’d built for her. A 24 by 24 foot, poured concrete house stable and would stand against the western Nebraska wind. And she was duly impressed. And they settled into this. Every one of us has been married. That early time of marriage. Passion and love and getting to know each other. It was a wonderful time.

That was in August of 1910. The winter of 1910, Roy began to toss and turn in his sleep. And horrible pain. And the doctor looked at him. Her name was Dr. Spix. And that was a lady doctor. And she lived in Gering, which was a full day’s ride in the buggy to get there. So they didn’t just go there for, you know, tests and x-rays. And didn’t have those things. She poked around on Roy and said, “You know, I don’t know what’s going on in there. But if you’re not better in a while, why? We’ll have to go somewhere else and have somebody else look at you.” She says, “Because you’re beyond me. I don’t… I just don’t know what it would be. Have you ever been hurt or injured or sick?” He said, no, I guess he hadn’t. He couldn’t think of anything except one time he fell off a Charlie and Ebenezer’s haystack when they were stacking hay. And it hurt quite a bit, but it went away. It was the only thing they could nail it down to. But time went on. Spring came and it did ease. And he quit tossing in his sleep and things seemed to be better.

The summer of 1911 came and went and he sold his horses and collected some money and improved on the place, built a little shed and put a fence around it. And things were progressing on. And the fall of 1911 came and Ebenezer and he went to Colorado to Fort Collins. Took them about a week and they went down and they bought a wagon load of apples to sell. Kind of increased their income, plus they needed some for themselves. And they had a big wagon load of apples and the weather was getting cold and the apples might freeze. And so, Roy and Ebenezer decided to push the wagon into the shed where it would be protected from the cold weather. And Roy was guiding the tongue and Eb was pushing on the wheel in the back. And Roy tripped, hung his heel up on the little post in the middle of the sliding barn doors. And he fell with the tongue in his middle.

And from there on things weren’t good again. And by the middle of October, pushing November, he was much too sick for Dr. Fix to work on. And so Grace loaded him in the wagon and they headed to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

And Cheyenne, Wyoming, the only doctor there was at the fort. And they went out there and he said, “I don’t know. You know, what’s going on here?” He would take exploratory surgery and he said, “This man is not strong enough to stand it.” So the next place that Grace could go was her parents, south of there at Nunn. And so she went there and Roy began to revive there somewhat. And so she took her little brother, Oscar, who was about ten years old at the time. And he went with her and they headed for Fort Collins, Colorado, because there was the resemblance of a medical school there. And there should be some help there.

And as they were crossing the Poudre River, Oscar heard a funny noise and they turned around and Roy had died. Right in the middle of the river. And so Grace took him and his body and went on into town and had the request of an autopsy. The medical school was more than willing to do that for nothing to… for their training. And they found out that in these two injuries somewhere, he’d suffered great internal injuries. And he actually had some gangrene from one of them and it had absorbed itself and he’d lived through that. But the final thing that just done him in. Too much internal injury.

So Grace stood beside a grave with her little brother and buried in Fort Collins, Colorado. And as she stood there, she recognized the stirrings within her of new life. And in May, I guess as the story goes, of 1912, she bore a son.

She stayed around none there, just gathering emotional strength. And claimed upon a homestead herself there for her father. And some of that family still lives on that land. And as her grief subsided and she began to gain some strength, she decided to come back to that honeymoon house in Banner County. And so when the little boy was five years old, she re-hitched up the buggy and gathered everything she owned, came back.

Getting there in the middle of the night after a couple of days traveling. Kicking the door open on the house that had no one living in it for those five years. Hearing the scurry of little feet in there of all sorts of new residents that had taken up housekeeping there. Lighting the lamp and the light shining back out through the front door. Out across the waving grass shining in the lantern light. And unrolling a bedroll and putting her little boy to sleep and waking up the next morning. Looking out on a country that almost was strange to her at that point. Completely strange to the little boy too because he had no memories of this. And he stood in the door and looked at the table land in the south. Hills and canyons full of cedar trees. And seven or eight miles away. Clear across the floor of the valley. Looking to the east and there was the Spieth table high up there with a new little Methodist Episcopal church built on the top of it. Sweeping his view around and looking to the west and there were 66 mountains. Rising up there 5200 feet at its highest spot. And that was what the little boy saw. His first view. The first morning. That he came back to what was going to be called his home.

With a mother that had no idea how she was going to support herself. But God was in the story because she got the United States Post Office contract and ran the whole United States Post Office out of her living room. And it really was a salvation to her as the story goes because she had this social contact day after day. Cowboys and pioneer families coming in there. Getting their mail. If the mail stage hadn’t been there they’d sit around on chairs in the sun’s shiny side of the house if it was winter. And on the shady side in the summer. And visit until it came. And the little boy grew up and that was his contact with the mail world. Where all these men would sit on the chairs and talk and tussle his hair and visit and spit and chew and tell stories.

And the widow woman ran the post office and talked to him and visited with him. And she was going to make it. And one day later on while she was working in the post office or cooking or doing something in the house. And the little boy was at the front door and he kept opening the door and shutting the door and open the door and shutting the door. And she kept saying things like, “Quit fanning that door. You’re letting in the cold. Quit fanning the door. You’re going to wear out the hinges. Quit fanning that door.” And he just shut the door and opened the door and shut the door. Pretty soon she said, “What are you doing?” And the little boy said, “Looking at the windmill.” And she said, “Okay.” And then dawned on her that her windmill was clear around on the backside of the house. And she went to the door out of curiosity and looked and there was no windmill anywhere. She looked clear to that table and out across there was nothing.

So she tussled his hair and figured he was just in some game, imagining something. Shut the door. And in just a very short moment he says, “There is a windmill.” And the door wasn’t open and he was looking out the keyhole in the old front door.

And she said, “Is that right?” And he says, “Yes, there is a windmill.” And so she got down on her knees and looked through the keyhole and sure enough, right in the center of the keyhole was a windmill turning in the western Nebraska wind.

And so then she began fanning the door. And she opened the door and she looked and she looked and there was no windmill. So she shuts the door and gets back down on her knees and looks again. And there most certainly is a windmill. It’s running there. The sun is flashing off of the blades just plain as day. It’s a new windmill. You can see that.

So she opened the door and looked again. Some men came to gather the mail and she said, “You know, we have something going on here.” She said, “There’s a windmill. And I’ve been gone for five years.” And she said, “It’s kind of a mystery and we’d like to have a little explanation. You guys have been around here for a long time.” She says, “Why is there that we see a windmill off somewhere in the south there?” She didn’t want to tell them everything. They’d think she was completely crazy. And one of them said, “Well, the only thing I can think of is the Swede moved in down on the tableland. He dug a 300-foot well all by hand. Took him two years. And he put up a windmill down there. It’s a mile back off of the Rimrock.”

So then she had three or four cowboys standing there looking. Pretty soon one of them got down on his knees and looked through the keyhole. And sure enough, there was a windmill there. And he said, “Well, it must be Pearson’s windmill. It has to be Pearson’s windmill. It’s the only thing that’s down there.”

But the thing that’s illustrated in me as I think of that story is the fact that you need something to bring your point of view down real good and take a look and see where God is. Because He’s all around there. Everybody that looked down there saw everything, didn’t they? But it wasn’t until they looked through the keyhole in that door that they were able to see the windmill. And that measured distance within a half a mile is about 10 miles down there where that windmill was. And if you can imagine the 10-foot windmill wheel in 10 miles, it’s pretty small.

Well, the widow woman and the little boy were stuck in this homestead house with only a windmill for entertainment through a keyhole. And the widow woman was a praying woman and she took the little boy to the little church on the hill.

And she prayed daily that the little boy would not get the measles or the mumps or the diphtheria or something because there were many little kids buried in that cemetery across from that old church. More kids than adults were buried there at that time. But he continued to grow and he became a man. I’m glad he did because he is my father.

And when he would tell that story, it was just like he was living it. Living there in that homestead house. But as I think of mankind as God created us and put us here and said, we are very good. They were very good, not because of the hardships and the pain and all of that. It tempered them. Probably made me to a degree what I am today. But it was because they were special in God’s eyes. And that in that process of all that pain, my grandmother decided to put herself into relationship with God because she had absolutely nothing else. She buried her whole future in the ground in November of 1911. She laid him to rest. That was her future. And if you’ve been in love, you know how that is at the start. That is it. That is your soul being. There’s probably very little thought of God in that process sometimes. You say your vows before God and you go through all that process, but it’s after some things of temperature. And her kneeling and looking out the keyhole is a clear illustration of what we need to do at the start of camp. It’s to look through the keyhole and see what’s in there.

And discover what is turning and flashing and what is through that keyhole. And if not CFO’s keyhole, it is your keyhole. Because it is your front door and it is your life. My grandmother could have continued to humor my dad and think he was in a playful imaginary state. But no, she chose to kneel down and look through that keyhole and see what he saw.

And so I come here willingly kneeling and looking through a keyhole. I want to do that. Do you want to do that? Do you want to look through the keyhole? Because it’s our choice. We can stay monkeying around with all the other stuff that is pleasant and, you know. And we’ll leave here and it will be okay and it’s been kind of a nice time and all. But I want to willingly do that. Anybody else in this room want to willingly look at those things? I got a few nods. A few nods. It’s a little bit nervous to do… it makes you nervous to do that. Because that puts you into relationship with that Creator that looked and said, “It is very good.” But in order to achieve some serenity and some meaning in my life, every time I’ve done that there was results. Every time I was willing to look through the keyhole, see what was out there.

There was results. Changes happened. Marriages were saved. Children grew up with a belief in God. All referring to my own, they aren’t perfect like yours, but nearly. At one stage I thought they were perfect. But then they became teenagers. Now I love you teenagers too. Just the stages things, but as a parent it makes you wonder why you started out on that project.

But we’re all perfect. We’re not all perfect. We’re all God’s creation. And we are very good. Not in a righteous sense. Just the fact that He loved us. And said, “You know, you’re the one that I want to put in charge of some things here. And you’re responsible.” It’s only when we become irresponsible and don’t seek God’s direction that we’re in trouble, because God’s always there. God always counts on us.

Well, you can think on these things as we go from here to rhythms and creatives and rest time and free time and prayer time and supper time. And maybe God will speak to us. And, if He doesn’t show you the windmill right away this morning, you know, we’ve got a whole week. There’s no hurry. Just relax. Keep looking through the keyhole.

Let’s pray. Lord, we’re so thankful that You’ve allowed us to be here. Words can’t express it. Words can’t express it. The sense that You, in all Your greatness and all Your power and all Your majesty, made this whole shebang and said it’s very good. So it behooves us, Lord, and forgive us when we haven’t. Step back into alignment with You and… With the assurance that what we look through in the keyhole in our lives is not going to kill us. It’s there and it’s going to be a big, wonderful surprise.

So continue to guide us as we go from this place. And enjoy this creation. As we leave here with great expectations. And we pray all of that in Jesus’ name. Amen.