All We Have Now

May 23, 2023

Beloved:

          Come July, when I’m sweating through my clothes, I hope I remember Mother Nature’s tenderness toward us now.  The evening breeze and stippled light make watering my flowerbeds and sweeping off the driveway practically perfect in every way.  With hardly a biting bug to be found, my neighbor Susan and I enjoy long consultations about the sorry state of grass between our respective houses, and why my lily-of-the-valley didn’t bloom — as lily-of-the-valley blooms positively everywhere.
          Two of the kindest men I know helped with the heavy work of laying down loads and loads of compost, topsoil and mulch so the beds around my house are in.  For all the plants I’ve planted, the beds still look bare to me.  Three years, as I learned early in my gardening life, three years to get a perennial bed established.  Year One the roots go down.  Year Two the green comes up.  Year Three the blooms come out.
          I’ve known it so long I can’t remember who first told me, only that they for sure spoke of gardening.  Not the spiritual life.  Not this life in Our Maker, Creator, Loving One — when so much time can pass wherein nothing seems to happen, nothing good or strong or hopeful.  Nothing beautiful, especially.  Maybe it’s Year One — or it could be — in our thinking, in our self-understanding, our meaning-making of these days.  Isn’t that what makes us human — the need to make meaning of what happens to us?  The golden retriever at my feet has never spent a single second worried about the future.  She is happy or she is asleep, except for when she’s hungry or sick.  But she’s never worried, never wondering, “Where is God?”  She lives in God simply by being her creaturely self.
          So, Year One — when new roots are going down, twining themselves into this ground which is part and parcel of its Maker.  Year One — when all the necessary patience, grace, prayer, self-control and Sabbath are as critical as light and water.  Year One — when appearances have nothing to do with what is happening in the depths we cannot see, or likely even access for now.  
          For now all we have is trust.  As every green thumb already knows, trust is the greater part of gardening anyway, us doing our part, Mother Nature doing hers.   May we be found faithful in all the soil we tend, our own hearts most of all. 

Updates from my birdfeeders: 

• A woodpecker and a blackbird have discovered the capsaicin suet and are big fans. 
• Southside raccoons are as nefarious as their northside kin.  The hummingbird feeder was vandalized and I found my best, most expensive feeder across the way  two houses down, muddy and empty but intact.  As this is not my first encounter, I’ve increased feeder security, think thick zip ties and double lock carabiners.  Let the games begin.

---