Norris Family News

More Life at the House of Cornelius

Tonight a spontaneous worship service started up in the meeting hall at the House of Cornelius. One of the team members from this week's outreach team is a cellist and brought her instrument. Another team member plays the piano. So the two of them started playing contemporary worship songs together, just improvising based on the guitar chords written on the music. A crowd quickly gathered and we sang to the Lord. I joined it immediately after having a truly heavenly conversation and prayer time with another team member. We live in a place of incredible blessing.

Today Mike and I tackled the last giant forest of weeds on the campus. Andy Wolcott and John Lambert have slaved to rid almost the entire campus of weeds, including the land around our house and the Hutchins' house which they prepared before our arrival. What an incredible blessing that was! But there is one patch left on an empty lot. It is truly amazing. It is the Fanghorn forest of weeds. They are up to 10 feet tall and have trunks (not stems) the size of my arm! Mike and I are both software developers. We both share the stereotypical, software-developer qualities of laziness, impatience and hubris. That is to say that we tried to devise several ways to extract giant weed forests with mechanization. There were a few weed stands that had large trunks where we tied a rope around several of the trunks and wrapped the rope around the whole stand. The rope was then attached to the tractor which effortlessly pulled the giant beasts out of the ground. But alas, most of the weeds are still very large, but are tall and spindly so the rope just slips off. In the end, the most efficient means is one-on-one shovel-to-trunk combat.

So I was tackling the weeds with a shovel and pulling up the spindly ones by hand until I saw a big, shiny black widow spider dangling in the weed with which I was about to become intimate. I stood back for a moment and beheld the vast expanse of weeds ready to swallow me, probably full of black widows. So my mind went back to the tractor. This time I used the front end loader. I put the bucket on the ground, tilted down slightly. Then a drove it through the forest and out the other side. Most of the weeds stayed in the ground and just laid down under the blade, but some of the bigger ones were uprooted. Behind me was a huge swath cut through the forest, which was immensely satisfying. Also behind me were the broken-off access and cleanout pipes for the lot's septic system. Oops. Then, in trying to turn the tractor around I got the 1950's relic in some state where I couldn't get it out of gear. Then I got the bucket stuck in the down position such that it pressed a little shaft sticking out the front which shut off the PTO which shut off the hydraulics which meant the bucket couldn't be moved. I sheepishly went to find Mike and explain my predicament. We spent the next hour with a jack, freeing the bucket so we could move the tractor and get it out of gear and into reverse. It was a minor disaster. But in the process I think I squished the black widow...so I still won.

--Thaine