“Sometimes It’s Just The Little Things”
This week I saw something so beautiful, so simple, so unexpected, yet so profound. For weeks, my wife and I both have seen our neighbor’s lilies burst forth only to wonder when, or even if, ours might do the same. Frankly I’d begun to think it just wasn’t going to happen at all. Then it did. Just like that two gorgeous orange lilies arrived in all their fragile, temporary splendor.
Over the last several days I like perhaps many of you have felt bombarded with the emotional shrapnel of continued gun violence, continued signs of impactful climate change, and now painful decisions from our nation’s highest court. These Supreme Court decisions have rolled back human rights, stripped away environmental protections, and further chipped away at the always vulnerable wall of separation of church and state foundational to our country’s unique experiment of religious freedom. In such profoundly maddening moments, thanks to my Baptist faith background, I’m naturally drawn to want to find some kind of solace from the scriptures. This week Psalm 46 just kept coming to mind.
“God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in times of trouble. Therefore we will not fear….” The ancient Hebrew hymn writer’s words here are so familiar, yet this week evoked both different emotions and thoughts. First, isn’t fear, doubt, and angst a natural, normal human reaction when we are overwhelmed and unable to make sense and meaning of things? And second, clearly these sentiments of reassurance and comfort echoed throughout the Psalms and the prophetic literature are aspirational rather than rooted in the concrete realities of life as we experience it. After all, when we feel as the psalmist expresses here that our world has been turned upside down or is being torn at its seams, what else is there to do but to fear?
The psalmist continues “There is a river whose streams make glad the City of God…” Again until this week, I’d not noticed how unrealistic these words actually are to the actual “facts on the ground.” The reference here is to Zion, the second Temple, Jerusalem. Yet this city has no so river, only a small spring. Bountiful rivers that offer continuous refreshment don’t just spring up in the desert any more than mountains are “made low.” More metaphorical, aspirational language meant to instill hope and to reassure, yet it just didn’t strike me as such this time around. These words are quite common in the Hebrew Bible, yet such poetic expressions of a kind of heavenly ideal divorced from the real just left me more angry and less grounded. Apparently poetic, beautiful words just aren’t cutting it for me these days. How about you?
Sometimes it’s just the little things that surprise us, give us a glimpse of hope, and remind us of the ground of being that connects us in this thing called life. A little thing like two fragile, temporary, beautiful lilies. Take time this week to look outside into your garden, take a walk, or slip off your shoes and let your feet sink into the earth. Who knows what you’ll find, or what you’ll feel.
Amen.