Small Mercies in a Troubled World

Beloved:
A very old friend was through town last week. We had about 20 delightful hours together, reminiscing and catching up on each other’s lives.  We are both recently single after long marriages. We are both healing and grateful for good memories and good friends. She is still one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. Revisiting nineteen-year-old me and all she didn’t know about her life yet ~ marriage, kids and ministry most of all ~ has been a tender blessing for me since.

I continue to believe it won’t rain all summer.  Some plants are flourishing while others struggle to stay upright.  The milkweed is taller than me now and I pull up runners every day.  They have bigger flower heads this year than they’ve ever had before, which hopefully means more butterflies laying eggs.
Two items on my garden to-do list:

1. Separate the irises I planted too close in the beginning. Their tubers are already on top of one another, which I hear will cause them to cross breed and turn all the flowers blue.
2. Buy two slinkies to slide over the long wire from which my bird feeders are suspended so squirrels and raccoons can’t eat from them.  I’ve watched a dozen videos and it seems to work some of the time.  For $6 I’m willing to try it.  (FYI ~ I have “squirrel-proof” feeders already.)

I remain equally heartbroken over the state of the world. My extra son, brought home from college by my original son 12 years ago, is from a part of the world that has been wracked by civil war for three years and has just now made the news here. His parents are displaced inside India. We stay in touch and they are safe but they have more family there about whom they worry constantly. Such hardship I cannot imagine and it is multiplied a hundred times over throughout the world, rarely or never crossing our news feeds.

Making sense of our privilege in so troubled a world is the never ending work of faith; acknowledging that the same systems which benefit us oppress others is hard but necessary. Adjusting our behaviors, attitudes and opinions accordingly is too. And finally - working to correct injustice as we are able and sacrificing privilege for the sake of solidarity with the suffering. We are never finished, nor required to do the hardest work 24/7/365. We are also allowed, not just allowed but encouraged, to rest and refresh, to recover and restore ourselves for the work.

Thankfully, therefore, goes the free entertainment of my tiny garden where life bursts from the ground and squirrels swing and bounce on slinkies. 

~  peace & prayers, pastor annette