Skip to main content

Betze-Post

Stuart returned recently from a business trip that took him to Betze-Post, an open pit goldmine outside of Elko, Nevada. He came home spilling over with bits and pieces of information. This is unusual for him. Work is work and home is home and never the two shall meet.

Stuart followed a tractor-trailer carrying an oversized load onto the mine site. Four tires lay on the trailer bed...replacements for an earth-moving machine. Since 1986 when the mine opened, these machines have eaten away an entire mountain and have dug an additional sixteen hundred feet below the water table. The resulting hole looks like an inverted ziggurat and is deeper than the Sears Tower is tall. Stuart stood on the precipice and peered over. Mechanical ants scurried around below with bits of dirt between their jaws.

The gold is microscopic and all of it is mapped out. This means that the miners can gobble and dump many truckloads of earth without sifting through for treasure. When they are digging in the valuable areas, they place the rock and dirt into storage piles to be processed. The rock is crushed and then put into a roaster. The ore that remains is mixed with sodium cyanide and a series of other chemicals. In the end, gold... and eighteen tons of waste to accompany each 18 kt ounce.

Betze-Post keeps longer hours than Walmart...twenty-four hours a day...three hundred sixty-five days a year. Walmart closes on Christmas Day. The mine has produced more than 33 million ounces of gold. Does this sound like a lot? Financially speaking...more than a billion dollars. Materially speaking...the gold recovered would fit in our living room.

God's Word is full of gold. Unlike precious metal, it cannot be mapped out. What I mine from a chapter today may not be what I mine from the same chapter a year from now. There is not a page that can be shoveled aside as worthless. This means locations (Numbers 33 for example) and the genealogies are priceless treasures!

I am astonished how we humans go to such great lengths for material gain. Our drive for more pushes us to literally move mountains! Betze-Post makes me ask questions. “Where am I on the greed continuum? How much of my time is spent grasping for wealth that will slip through my fingers? How much of my energy is spent storing up treasure in heaven?”

I want the riches that will last for eternity.

Popular posts from this blog

4-H Exhibits-Updated

Update: Blue ribbons all around! 4 of our projects will go onto the state fair. John's headboard exceeds size limitations and so we will lug it home tomorrow. We are relieved. That thing is heavy! ************* For the past few weeks we have been busy sewing, sawing, quilling and painting 4-H projects. The kids have been in 4-H for about a month and they started with a bang. The annual 4-H fair is tomorrow. So this morning we loaded these projects and four kids wearing slippers into the car. The fifth one had sense enough to wear flip-flops. (The other four complained as we pulled out of the driveway that their feet were sweating.) John reclining against the headboard that he built with Stuart. He wrote the 10 Commandments of Table Saw Safety to accompany this project. Claire's quilling project. Lauren modeling the apron that she sewed. Lauren and the dog painting she has been working on in art class for the past few months. Faith and her quilling project. So now...

Finding Rest: Part Two (Scroll down three posts to read this story from the beginning)

Why share such a personal story ? I share it because I have talked to enough women to know that underneath the makeup and the matching outfits and the small talk that make up our exteriors, we are a broken people. To pretend otherwise creates isolation. Thoughtful honesty creates closer relationships and greater understanding. When we share the way God works in the difficult things of life it encourages first oneself and then others. For some of us, the pieces have been patched and restored and there is wholeness where there was none before. But some of us are walking wounded, barely hanging on and wondering if there is hope. We have a choice. We can either be completely shattered by bitterness, depression and anger or we can lay the fragments before the One who can take the sharp slivers and jagged pieces and create a beautiful, productive life. Here is the conclusion to John's story. When John was ten, he was sullen and moody and difficult and so was I. But I was no longer proud....

Aviary Amphitheater (Wordless? Wednesday)

We're slow starters in the morning. The children lie on the sofas and read. Charlie sits and eats a graham cracker and a bowl of yogurt at the table before breakfast. Lauren and I take turn cooking oatmeal, or muffins, or scones... We eat somewhere between ten and eleven. Today, in the midst of all this leisure, the house became exceptionally quiet and I went to figure out why because "too quiet" is never a good thing. Except that it was today. I peeked out the living room window into the backyard and found five chairs and five children lined up on the patio. I opened the door and everybody shushed me. "Hush, Mama. We're watching the birds. Come sit with us" Six or seven hummingbirds were zipping around the feeder, frantic to fill their little gas tanks before they migrate. The children were silent, heads tipped up, eyes squinting against the morning light. I went in to get the camera. I took a few pictures of the children but could not capture the hyperacti...