Eyes to See

August 28, 2018

Beloved:
             The light and air are changing from summer to September.  It’s still hot as blazes everywhere but I see my daisies and tomatoes passing from their prime.  The sedum won’t peak for a few more weeks, nor the Purple Beautyberry (calicarpa americana) shrub.  They are the stars of their own show.  The racket in the woods sounds like elephants but is actually just squirrels.  They drag enormous dead leaf bundles up the trees to refurbish winter nests.

            Mornings on the porch are precious time to me.  Connecting with my neighborhood of trees and birds and dogs, the squirrels who rob my garden.  I like imagining they don’t know this is my house, that I’m the one making mortgage payments.  That to them it’s just another part of home, a nice gutter for a nest, a rest stop for some nectar, a pipe to store this winter’s nuts.  A good housekeeper drives them away.  A good neighbor shares the space.  My hope is to split the middle.  The nuts stored in my drainage tile never go away and cause all kinds of water problems, so I blast that with a power hose.  The next can stay until the babies fly away or it falls into the downspout - whichever one comes first.  Spider webs can stay forever because of the way dew beads hang there like diamonds in the morning.

            Eyes to see, Jesus said over and over, eyes to see.  Eyes to see the riches money can never buy.  Knowing even still that time to sit and watch the morning is the privilege of a few.  A chair, a porch, coffee in the quiet . . . . . eyes to see the privilege I enjoy.  Would that seeing would become believing that this privilege is so much more than blessing.  It’s an arsenal, a deep, deep reservoir of power and advantage with which to bend this world’s ways in the direction of justice, decency, goodness, kindness and grace.
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            For all of us with time for early morning prayers, may the strength we draw be strength we spend on the work to which God has called us.  

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette