Works in Progress

July 30, 2024
Beloved: 
          Yay, real rain overnight!  Soaky, seeping all the way into the ground rain.  Enough rain to wet the flowerbed below the giant oak tree even.  I hurried outside a little while ago to drive some stakes around my three milkweed plants tipped nearly to the rock-hard ground around them.  They are nearly six feet tall with giant pods at the top.  My neighbor’s retired science teacher friend

says no eggs yet, but the monarchs will likely find them soon.  My own yard could take days and days of steady rain like this so I can just imagine what farmers wish-hope-pray for in such weather.  Their heads must be full of math, factoring time and cost to pinpoint the day when their water bills exceed the profit on the very crops upon which that water falls.  I could stop watering today and lose some flowers, a few tomatoes and even fewer peppers.  They could lose their farm.
          Balance is everything . . . in everything.  Not just growing food and flowers, but spirit too.  Like in nature, the boundaries within which we might get spiritual life right are huge, enormous, vast.  There is no single way of growing tomatoes or hydrangeas.  Nor of being faithful.  Each life has their own set of trouble and trauma to navigate, and from which to heal.  As we heal ever so slowly in one area, we may grow by leaps and bounds in another and incur new sorrow in still another.  Such is the way of things in nature, our own lives included.  All of which is accounted for in the will of God, I trust.
          What if God is more kindly and patient with us than we are with ourselves?  What would it mean to work this notion into our thinking, praying, believing selves like working compost into clay?  That no believer’s life is perfect, end to end, top to bottom, back to front – any more than any garden anywhere is in full bloom everywhere?  Both are constant works in progress.  Both are dependent on factors out of the believer’s (gardener’s) control.  Both necessitate the long view, the recognition that neither work is ever completed, but rather joined for the season we are given, learning to receive with grace whatever grace comes our way:  rain and sun, work and rest, food and flowers.  All in their own time.