When you wake up with the birds, you get to hear the
concert. This morning’s cantata was sung by turkeys, a rooster, crows, robins,
blue birds, mockingbirds and cardinals with the percussion section represented
by a pileated woodpecker on the dead locust tree just below our bedroom window.
It was glorious. I have noticed these concerts only last for a few minutes as
if the first order of the day for birds is to sing before getting down to the
nitty gritty of worm pulling… grace before meals. This in-between time…not dark
not light… filled with song set me to thinking about other in-between places in
my life.
This emerging season of spring has swung back and forth
between winter snows and summer heat with a dizzy feel. On Sunday we have sun
and heat while Tuesday brings snow and wind. I can’t get settled into either
season. Blueberry bushes are in bloom while the thermometer dips below
freezing. The weather has mirrored my life. I celebrate and grieve, laugh and
cry, dance and stumble my way through the days as I ponder and pray for those I
know and love who are facing hard choices, graduating from high school, turning
a corner in aging, living with an unpleasant diagnosis, turning into a
teenager, recovering from a hard winter or gardening in spite of the weather.
It takes faith of a peculiar kind to plant tomatoes in the mountains before
Mother’s Day.
I have been re-reading Buechner’s book “Beyond Words”
lately. I jumped ahead to read the section on Lent and found a description of
this holy season as an in-between time full of questions that demand answers, a
sackcloth and ashes time at the start of it, with something like Easter at the
end of it. It is a demanding in-between time in the life of faith. At the end
of the sackcloth and ashes, as Christians, we are called to celebrate an
impossible resurrection, one that flies in the face of our scientific knowledge
of how the world works. And yet…
The world around me on the farm is full of resurrection.
Daffodils bowed down with snow spring up in the warming heat, blazing yellow
mirrors of the sun. Junie B’s shaggy winter coat is shedding in wads as her new
sleek, shiny spring blackness emerges. Green grass, emerald green, covers the
hills on the farm and the willow tree down by the pond is wearing tiny little
yellow green leaves. Bloodroot and Spring Beauties, Redbud and Dogwood, Cherry
and Apple, Plum and Blueberry, Daffodils and Creeping Phlox all are blooming at
the same time oblivious to the swings in temperature. In the midst of death, we
have life but not without death first.
The calling of Lent is to repentance, or as Buechner defines
it, to come to your senses. Spring time, ever the changeable season, is the outward
and visible sign of undeserved grace for those who are coming to their senses.
Thank you, God of grace and glory, for the in-between times where I can catch
my breath while I remember to Whom I belong. Remind me that nothing lasts
forever save your Love. Keep me walking in the light even as I pass through
darkness until I come home to you. Amen.
