This yard has been my healing place.
Last summer, just as they were beginning to spread broad leaves and delicate flowers, the bursting plants faced the pounding hail -- and lost. All season I mourned the damage to what I had planted; the ragged Hostas and broken Jack Frost, their beauty punched full of painful holes.
But this spring they rose again, whole and full. And the storms have stayed away and let them flourish.
I've spent so many early mornings out here. Talking the plants through their traumas, reading words of inspiration, writing thoughts. And listening. Because somehow in the rustle of the leaves of the apple tree, the call of the chickadees, the silence of things growing I can hear the sound of God.
From within the very blades of the grass He calls me out here to be with him. To sink my feet in. To linger. It seems fitting to begin a new life in this very space where I most hear him whisper and comfort and nudge.
When the turmoil hit this week, we poured our mourning friends out onto the grass hoping that the whispers would reach them too, that the comfort from being where everything is still breathing life would be just the right setting. And it was. They came from everywhere to be present with us in the mending shade of the vines. It was right for us to be together, to move into pain and move out. It was right to throw up our hands in the midst of creation and say, "We don't understand." Because creation shows us the enduring love we're grasping for.
For his invisible attributes... his eternal power and divine nature... have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. -- Romans 1:20Four sunsets after the hit, we gathered on the grass again. The new friends and the familiar. The hurting and the hopeful. And in those moments we moved from questioning the fall of man to asking each other for help in our own falling. We handed each other checks and set up coffee dates and prayed for one another and ran home for just the thing this new friend needed. We said, "This is what I need." And then we said, "I can meet it." Out of this lawn, grew the church.
I will keep coming out here to listen. But now I will also come out to remember and to give thanks for healing. When I'm shaken and weary and worn, I will come out to hear the whisper of God. I will come to the matted grass to sit in the print of friends and feel their companionship when I'm ragged and torn. I will look to the perfect leaves of the Hostas to know what it looks like to be made new.
Though the storms come and shred us in a season, we burst back forth again and bring new beauty and purpose in the next. "Known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything." -- 2 Corinthians 6:10
Healing is coming. It is here. I can walk within it.
