This is the week of the year that our town doubles in population because there is a music festival going on. I used go get annoyed at all the trash in the streets and young people sprawling on every patch of grass on the street corners, but now I have my Bed & Breakfast and love this week, which provides my best business all year. All my rooms are booked months in advance and I love welcoming these music enthusiasts to my humble abode. A couple of years ago I started selling showers in my basement. I put a sign out on the main street (our house is hidden away behind it thru a small footpath). "Showers 50 kr., including shampoo, towel, phone charge, internet and nice garden". I put the sign out around noon on days that I was home, and it has proved good business so now I make sure I am home every day that the festival is going on. Throughout the afternoon groups of dusty young people come and settle in my garden and chit chat or snooze while they are waiting for their turn in line for my one shower. The other showers in town cost the same, but they have a time limit. I don't put a time limit on, so sometimes  people have to wait for an hour or more to get in, but they don't mind, because the green grass is so much nicer than the dust at the festival. They say that they love my little oasis, some of them come back year after year and call me mom. And I sell them coffee, popsicles, fruit etc. to pass their time. I also tell local friends that on these days I am home all the time, so I never know which friends might drop in during the day. Yesterday was a great day. Hot and sunny, clear blue skies and a steady stream of dusty kids who later emerged from my humble basement shower exclaiming that they have never felt better, that they have become new persons. I have a tiny toilet by my back door, which is more like a closet in size, but they are so thankful to use one that flushes and keep thanking me for providing this service.

Why do they like it here so much? I think our space might be blessed. Our lives certainly are, and since we inherited this old house from my uncle 16 years ago we have filled it with prayer, community and friendships. People who stay at our Bed & Breakfast mention the "good aura" of our home, and now with the annual influx of young people who claim to love our little oasis I think of it again: The Lord has really blessed our little patch, and when people drop by they can sense it.

Yesterday good old Swedish friends popped by for lunch. They are a missionary couple who target festivals to share the love of God and hand out Street Bibles. I have been working with them many years ago on the first Street Bible in Denmark and we just did a revision. I translate and proofread, which is how I make a living, but I decided that I would rather be paid in Bibles than in cash this time. So they came by with some boxes fresh from print, it was so great to see them after eight years, and we had lunch and great fellowship in the garden surrounded by my shower guests. They opened the first box and we started giving Bibles away to those who would take one. And many would. They sat and read them while waiting for their showers and most of them took them along when they left. Later after the Swedes left, Sussie came by for coffee. She is a new believer whom I led to the Lord three years ago and she kept encouraging the kids to take one. "This book can change your life. I am a new Christian and it has changed mine!". So they listened to her story, drank my coffee, took their showers. For an hour or more they had sat in my quiet garden and soaked up the peace, felt the green grass on their toes and liked it. They had been in our space and sensed that it was good.

My story is one of the life stories in the colorful first part of the Street Bible. It describes how as a teenager I felt so wrong, so out of place in this world, so unloved. My parents were divorcing and I had no purpose, no destiny. Then I found faith, I found the greatest love one could ever dream of and the landscape of my life started to change. The last 38 years God has been my best friend and molded me, taught me how to live, blessed me with a great family and a wonderful church full of precious friends.

Perhaps when people sit here for a while they can sense it. The blessing, the peace, the refreshing. Dave's grandmother was a homesteader on a small island in Canada. She cleared some bush and planted a garden that fed her and many others. I still remember the feasts she provided early in our marriage, I remember her bending over weeding her huge garden even after she had turned 80. She used to say "I wish everyone could eat as well as we do". I echo that now, 25 years later. I have tasted and I have seen that God is good. My life is a blessed garden. And when people come here and sit a while they are prone to read a bit in that book. Be refreshed, have their appetite whetted. And I can tell them that they can indeed eat as well as I do.

Blind old Isaac could not see his son but he said that he smelled like a field that the Lord had blessed. He could smell something good. It is my prayer that when my dusty friends come and sit in my garden and read my story and the other stories in the Street Bible they would smell something good. And meet the Great Refresher. And start eating as well as I do.