looking through me

Tag: wonder

August 11, 2016

through the valley

I love driving through California’s central valley. I love the vineyards and groves. I love the ranches and dairies and processing plants. I love the train tracks and irrigation canals. And I love the ascent from the valley floor into the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

But this trip I gasped in despair more than in wonder. Roadside, family-run fruit stands sat shuttered. Dead and dying orchards dotted the horizon, and too many sun-crisped fields highlighted the drought’s devastation. In the mountains, the evergreen forest was strewn with rust-hued trees—still standing, though rendered lifeless by voracious bark beetles.

Climbing higher, whole valleys and mountainsides scorched and blackened by last summer’s 237-square-mile Rough Fire gave an eerie, apocalyptic stillness to the summer air. Work crews cut down dead trees . . . but they only remove the ones in danger of falling on the road. Tens of millions wait for gravity to bring them down.

Ongoing drought, invasive insects, bone-dry vegetation and record-setting fires conspired—and continue conspiring—to alter the landscape.

Yet even in the bleakness there is beauty. Tender undergrowth pokes through charred brush. Dry meadows rustle at the wind’s slightest provocation. New life sprouts on seared trunks. Hawks and ravens soar on warm updrafts. Wildflowers splash droplets of color across the muted terrain. Mountain streams tumble into lakes.

Different . . . and the same.

Beauty remains.

 

 

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August 2, 2016

coffee with grandma

I stopped after work to have coffee with Grandma.

It’s been more than a year since she last drank a cup, but I doubt she minds. Whatever the heavenly brew is, it must be better than any she ever savored here.

My head knows I’m no closer to Grandma at the cemetery than anywhere else. My heart knows I’m not here out of obligation or even to grieve.

But it’s here—in the open space, in the relative still and relative quiet—I breathe a little easier. It’s here as I pray aloud through Psalms 16 and 116 that I feel God’s gracious hand of peace not removing the grief but holding it with me.

Here, I can simply be.

I sit still and allow the internal noise to quiet in the simple proximity to that eternal line—here a finishing line, there a starting line.

Here, I remember all the stuff—the work stresses, the tragedies layered over the atrocities, the nagging irritants of daily life—is real but it is tertiary at best. Relationships, with God and people, outweigh all else.

The late afternoon shadows spread but don’t quite make it to Grandma’s headstone or the sunflowers Mom left this morning. A mourning dove settles on a distant branch.

Even in a cemetery, life goes on.

A lone tear lands on the Bible resting in my lap. My coffee cup sits empty beside me. I unfold my legs, trace the dates on Grandma’s headstone and let my gaze linger for a minute longer on the psalmist’s words: “in your presence there is fullness of joy.”

A year into this newness it doesn’t feel normal yet—not at all—but the joy pulsing through the sorrow is full indeed.

 

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