It’s so beautiful here, but there is so much loss

Common grace is the family you have when the world around you shakes - mom in the kitchen, dad making coffee, grandma still there to tell you stories if you’ve got her, a sibling you can text and say “what is going on right now?”

It’s the beautiful September day with the leaves still turning different hues of red and yellow the same way they did last year while the news is on in the living room.

It’s the rain falling and the clock ticking and the rise and fall of your breath to match.

It’s the way the day keeps going and the sun makes its way across the sky the way it did yesterday, even if the circumstances beneath it have changed drastically .

It can’t be earned.

It’s not deserved.

You wake up every morning and have no control over whether you do or not, but we don’t think about that too often.

It’s so beautiful here, but there is so much loss.

And common grace still finds us, it’s extended to us somehow. It’s not something we can take because it’s not ours to give, we can’t get our hands around it. We fool ourselves to think we can. We open our eyes in the morning assuming we did that, we made that happen. No, we didn’t.

Grace is God’s to give, and I know He gave it to me when I didn’t even know what it was, know what to call it, know I was breathing it in every moment. And there was a time when I knew it was grace I didn’t deserve. A free gift, but why? A Hand held out, but why? Eyes to see, but why?

God rarely answers the why, I’ve realized. But He does answer with His presence, with love, with Himself. With Jesus and the Cross. With grace for all the ways I say the wrong thing and mess up and hurt the ones I love and take my life into my own hands by thinking I walk, and talk, and open my own eyes and make plans for the day like I own the day. Like it’s mine, like it couldn’t all go away in one second.

And it does for some. It did for some this week.

And what do we have after that?

The answer is Jesus. We have eternity because of Jesus. That grace to choose Him and live forever and have every tear wiped from our eyes (Revelation 21:4). But that’s what it is, a choice. A grace for those who believe and have asked for forgiveness and been forgiven. I hope you will.

The truth is there is so much loss, but it’s still so beautiful here.

And I hope you count that as grace because that’s exactly what it is. We don’t have the power to wake up in the morning and one day we won’t. I hope you know when that day comes exactly where you’re headed. Home. ❤️

Suddenly

Sometimes I think about how God could use the tiniest bird, sitting on a branch in a cave somewhere, to announce something big. How He is so often in the details.

I wonder if your transition,

the thing that you’re praying for,

will come with birdsong, not fanfare.

A tree you've walked past every day with your heartache will all of a sudden sway in your direction, and God will have made it new.

The thing you're praying for could be blooming in silence in the dark somewhere that nobody sees, but does that make it not real? Not happening?

Small things sing and fly and nestle in flowers every day. The most beautiful miracle could come in the quiet. You could wake up somewhere someday, in the story you prayed for, and not know how you got there.

As my sweet second father said, “one day you'll wake up and look around and say, ‘it happened so suddenly.’”

Suddenly, the bird will chirp in the cave. And the tree will sway. ❤️

More than the Flowers

I look around and all I see is dirt,

But the promise of new life teems just below the surface

This garden was burned to make the soil all the sweeter

More nourishing though it felt like a drought

More promising though the earth looked cracked and broken

I’ll never understand how everything is upside down in the world God created

The first last

And the last first

And this garden proof, that what looks empty and barren can bring forth more than it had before

This is the in-between where we hope against hope

That maybe it could be true, even though we don’t feel the rumble under our feet

That something could break forth any minute

And another thing

And another

Wild things with different stems and hand-painted colors, painted by the hand of a God who was in this garden long before I was

We forgot that He’s a God of time, who takes his time

Who will do the deep work

Will get His hands dirty

Would we really have it any other way?

Would we want a god whose hands were clean?

Who never touched us? Dirty as we were for all our digging in this garden for the old—old sins, old patterns, but yes, also old memories. He understands.

And yes, he dirties Himself for us, isn’t afraid of sitting next to us in the soil, in the dirt that turned to mud from our tears

If only we could see the whole garden He sees

One with vines climbing the old stone wall that has the door in it, where he knocked that first time

The handle’s gotten old and rusty now and maybe falls off the wood a bit, but he’ll fix that too

When I see the dirt, he sees the garden about to burst forth. It might look different than I expected, but always meticulously planned. Accounting for all my mistakes and doubts and wrong turns. Nothing left untouched, nothing unseen

The beds are ready, the stakes are in the ground, the birdbath is filled with water

There’s a lone robin on the branch above that has always sung its song

She has not let weather stop her nor the conditions beneath the branch she sits on deter her from singing the song she was given by the same God who fixes the rusted door handle, sits in the dirt with us, prunes what needs to be pruned, waits for the fresh soil to produce what He intended. Something more beautiful than I can imagine. And he never left me there, He’s waited too

Somehow, the company has become more to me than the flowers