The Fun Zone

On the Facilities page there is description of Sweetwater Ranch, the future home of Sweetwater’s operations. A portion of the ranch is called The Fun Zone. The Fun Zone was not the outworking of my mind’s whimsy – though that would be reason enough. There is a story behind it.

In April 2017 I was sick, really sick. The still-undiagnosed illness left me so fatigued that a leisurely stroll up our gravel road and back, a 200-yard round trip, would sap all my physical and mental energy and put me on my back for 2 hours. At the time I was employed as an Assistant Research Scientist with the Texas Institute for Applied Environmental Research where my brain was my money maker. Unfortunately, my illness produced such brain fog and eye pain that I could not analyze water data on a computer and write coherent sentences about the findings. Even reading my Bible for 15 minutes was enough to trigger vertigo and force me to rest with my eyes closed for an hour. I felt useless to my wife, my children, and my employer. A sense of uselessness is a devastating condition to most men and I was no exception. There was little I could do but rest and pray.

One warm, sunny morning I took my Crazy Creek seat to our backyard to convalesce in the sunshine to escape cabin fever. I found a quiet spot among spring wildflowers in an overgrown section of our property. Within seconds my attention was diverted from thoughts of self-pity.

I saw the most amazing thing. It was full of color – bright sunny yellows, shiny jade blacks, and greens so deep you could swim in them. It was full of movement – slow, steady, deliberate action with sudden and exciting bursts of activity that would just as suddenly screech to a standstill.

I was watching a dance. I was watching two beetles dusted with pollen gold mate inside a yellow flower. Solomon in all his splendor was never clothed like these two love bugs.

I wasn’t analyzing the bugs, the flower, or the climate. I wasn’t taking measurements on the time of day or the duration of the mating ritual. I was simply enjoying the beauty of the dance.

I don’t know how much time passed while I sat in motionless awe, perhaps 10 minutes. But those 10 minutes were a salve, dissolving the callous of 10 years of analyzing God’s beautiful creation instead of  simply enjoying God’s beautiful creation. How reviving! I was a kid again! When I chose a career in freshwater biology it wasn’t because it made money (it doesn’t) or because I was simply good at it, it was because when I was one year old I loved water. When I was 10 years old, I wanted nothing more than to play in streams and turn over stones and reveal what mysterious creatures lived underneath. If streams gave me joy as a child, I trusted God that streams would give me joy when I was 100. God blessed me with a disease that forced me to rest. He got my attention and revived my childlike fascination with beauty: the beauty of nature and the heart of the One who chose to create it with color, form, diversity, smell, order, process, bigness, and smallness.

The Fun Zone will exist on Sweetwater Ranch to ensure that I, the Director of a water research business, and all of Sweetwater’s staff and volunteers, and all of those who come to the ranch to analyze water, will always have a place to enjoy water. No research will be allowed in the Fun Zone. No talk of designing solutions to solve the world’s many water woes. The Fun Zone will have a rope swing hung high on a mature sycamore. The Fun Zone will have picnic tables and fire pits to prepare fresh fish which facilitate the kind of jovial conversation that accompanies fine freshwater fare. The stream in the Fun Zone will have a shallow wading area for the younger children and a deep pool for those who find pleasure in diving for pretty rocks that are less accessible. For everything there is a season (Ecc 3:1). There is a time to research water and a time to swing high off a rope into water.

          “Beauty is God’s Language. The Lord speaks in diverse ways: his deeds are words, as in the creation account we read, “He spoke and so it came to be.” He speaks in the splendors of the universe and through all within it….Beauty proclaims the divine.”

—Thomas Dubay, S.M.   The Evidential Power of Beauty