This advent season...

...I am spending covered in mud, wearing only my swimming trunks and digging a drainage channel for some missionaries. It´s hot in Brazil. And rainy. I was working the other day and getting so wet that swimming trunks were the only option left. Strangely liberating digging clay in the warm rain. It reminded me of being a kid. My brothers and i used to turn the hose on at the top of this soil area at the bottom of our garden (behind the hill, remember Mum?). Then we´d each build a wee river. Mine i remember was fast flowing and lined with tiny pebbles. Plenty of meanders. Deposition on the inside of the bend and erosion on the outside. Niall´s was wide and deep. Like the river Nile. I always found that funny. So as i sat in the dirt the other day with the rain fully lashing around me i smiled at the memory and was glad that all those hours in the soil weren´t wasted.