After the two days he left for Galilee. (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country.)When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.
Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.
“Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”
The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”
“Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”
The man took Jesus at his word and departed.While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living.When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.”
Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.
This was the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee. John 4: 43-54
Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe. Hebrews 11:1
Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. ~Christina Rossetti “Up-Hill”
This life of ours can be an arduous and often troubled journey.
We might feel like we are never able to reach a point of rest in our uphill climb through obstacles and hazards. It can be so dark we’re not sure we can see the road, much less where we’re headed.
When a royal official makes the 20 hour journey uphill to find Jesus to ask him to heal and save his son, he surely was at a point of desperate need. He is so convinced by the stories of Jesus’ power to heal, he would go wherever needed to make that happen for his dying son.
Yet he discovers Jesus’ power is not just in His hands, but in His words.
Our faith is not just based on what we see with our eyes, but in our trust and belief in Jesus, who is the Word.
When we are faced with that up-hill journey through troubled times, we will not be left stranded, lost and waiting by the roadside. Many have gone on before us, and those faithful are ready and waiting to help walk alongside us and give us encouragement to keep going.
There is a place waiting for wayfarers like us.
Jesus speaks the healing of the son and the royal official takes Him at His Word.
No longer is that official merely politically powerful; he descends back down the road to his home spreading the word to all around him about the far greater power of Jesus.
There is salvation through the Word to those who believe. We all are weary travelers welcomed with open arms as the uphill road points us to the best home of all.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
Lyrics by Lori McKenna:
When the road under your feet is dark and feels wrong And you find yourself lost and all your confidence gone And the stars over your head through the clouds won’t be revealed I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
When the weight of your troubles send your knees into the dirt And all your loyal distractions only magnify the hurt When lonesome doesn’t quite define how so alone you feel I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
Hard times and landslides are part of life I know Like they say, none of us get out alive Whatever ocean you’re swimming across However valley low Whatever mountains you climb I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
Blessed are the times filled with sun, surrounded by your friends Those days when all the new roads wait right where the old roads end And should you wake up to Everest right outside your windowsill I’ll walk with you even if it’s uphill
Hard times and landslides are part of life God knows We all got some mountains to climb Whatever ocean you’re swimming across However valley low I’m right here, I’ve been right here all this time And I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill I’ll walk with you, even if it’s uphill
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I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know.
I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I’ve lived longing for your ever look ever since. That longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as the body wanes. The longing will outlive this body.
I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know.
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes. And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant. That loneliness appeared on earth as this body. And my share of time has been nothing but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly. Your face fleeing my ever kissing it firmly once on the mouth.
In longing, I am most myself, rapt, my lamp mortal, my light hidden and singing.
The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within. ~William C. Bryant from “Among the Trees”
The sun was everywhere yesterday, thawing the frost layer on the metal roof of the barn to the point of seeping through the cracks, splattering with drops inside like taking an indoor shower during chores. I kept my hood on while I cleaned stalls, all the while trying to dodge the dripping.
The sun rays are trying to burst through our layers to activate Vitamin D thirsty skin, and there is actual warmth on our cheeks as we look up, squinting at the unaccustomed brightness.
At last, oh at last — after months of gray misty drizzle. It may be only a tease and not the real thing. Rain is back today and sub-freezing temperatures are forecast again over the next week.
Even so, the soil is feeling seduced. The snowdrop sprouts have thrust through the frozen ground and crocus are peeking out hopefully on our side of the crust rather than staying tentative and hidden down under.
This brief glimpse of spring was worth waiting for, even if winter breaks loose again for a few weeks and plunges us back into doldrums and gloom. If only a peek, it is still promise of a coming renewal and rebirth.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. ~John Donne from “Annunciation”
I know this sound, first birds of morning. As a child, I waited for hours for the drape of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song, able at last to close my eyes. I know this sound, some kind of redemption, waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment even as the work of the previous day marks my bones in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls like a promise you hoped someone would keep. ~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light
Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.
Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.
It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.
When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:
“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…
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Cold, wet leaves Floating on moss-coloured water And the croaking of frogs— Cracked bell-notes in the twilight. ~Amy Lowell “The Pond”
Poets who know no better rhapsodize about the peace of nature, but a well-populated marsh is a cacophony. ~Bern Keating
O, I love to hear the frogs When they first begin to sing; How they vocalize the bogs, And vociferate the Spring. How they carol as they croak, How they mingle jest and joke With their solemn chant and dirge On the river’s slimy verge.
O, I love to hear the frogs, For their monotone uncouth Is the music of the cogs Of the mill wheel of my youth. And I listen half asleep, And the eyes of mem’ry peep Through the bars that hold me fast, From the pleasures of the past.
O, I love to hear the frogs, For their melody is health To the heart that worry flogs With the lash of want or wealth. And the cares of life take wing, And its pleasures lose their sting, And love’s channel way unclogs In the croaking of the frogs. ~Harry Edward Mills “The Early Frogs”
I wanted to speak at length about The happiness of my body and the Delight of my mind …
But something in myself for maybe From somewhere other said: not too Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the Frogs are singing. ~Mary Oliver, from “April”
About two weeks ago, music from the wetlands became faintly detectable in the distance. We were only a little over a month into winter, yet due to unduly mild temperatures, the chorus had begun.
The sleigh-bell jingle song of the Pacific Chorus Frogs now fills the air each evening, rising from the ponds and standing water that surround our farm. I stand still for a moment to soak up that song that heralds spring–a certainty that the muddy marshes are thawed enough to invite the frogs out of their sleep and start their courting rituals.
Now winter won’t return anytime soon with any seriousness.
This marsh music is disorienting this early, along with daffodils budding in late January and lawns needing mowing in February. With voices so numerous, strong and insistent, it feels as though a New York City of frogs has moved in next door; we are seated in the balcony of Carnegie Hall.
They seem to be directed by an unseen conductor, as their voices rise and fall together and then cut off suddenly with a slice of the baton, plunging the landscape into uncomfortable silence at the slightest provocation, as if they hold an extended fermata for minutes on end.
The frogs’ repertoire is limited but their wind power, stamina and ability to project their voices impressive. They are most tenacious at making their presence known to any other peeper within a mile radius. Their mystical, twilight symphony of love and territory has begun, soft and surging, welcome and reassuring.
There’s a spring a-comin’, the peepers proclaim. Nothing can be sweeter.
I know all the behaviorist theories about frog chorus being about territoriality –the “I’m here and you’re not” view of the animal kingdom’s staking their claims. Knowing that theory somehow distorts the cheer I feel when I hear these songs. I want the frogs (and birds) to be singing out of the sheer joy of living. Instead, they are singing to defend their piece of mud or branch.
Then I remember, that’s not so different from people. Our voices tend to be loudest when we are being insistently territorial: we own this and you do not, and we are irresistibly better than you.
I’m not sure anyone enjoys human cacophony in the same way I enjoy listening to the chorus of frogs at night or birdsong in the morning. We humans are most harmonic when we choose to listen. Instead of sounding off, we should soak up. Instead of shouting “this is mine,” we should sit expectant and grateful.
Perhaps that is why the most beloved human choruses are derived from prayers and praise – singing out in joy and gratitude rather than in warning.
I’ll try to remember this when I get into my own righteous and “territorial” mode. I don’t bring joy to the listener nor to myself. When it comes right down to it, all that noise I make is nothing more than a croaking cacophony in a smelly mucky swamp.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. ~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Kindness” in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ― Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields… Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. ~Mary Oliver from “Why I Wake Early”
Have you ever noticed how much of Christ’s life was spent in doing kind things – in merely doing kind things? … he spent a great proportion of his time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people.
There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping. But what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.…
I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are. How much the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is remembered. ~Henry Drummond from The Greatest Thing in the World
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. ~Wendell Berry from “How to Be a Poet”
I wake up discouraged by the desecration of kindness in this world.
I share here what I pluck out of each morning’s sacred silence, sharing my thanks to God for what is astonishingly beautiful so as not to forget each moment.
And here you are, receiving my aching heart with gentleness, listening to what emerges from my “telling out” each morning, so often reacting with kindness and encouragement.
That is even more astonishing to me.
Thank you for being here to see what I discover. Thank you for sharing with others in your life. Thank you for letting me know it makes a difference.
Welcome back, each and every day. So happy you are here, kind souls – the only thing that makes sense anymore.
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This saying good-by on the edge of the dark And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm. “How often already you’ve had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an ax— Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God. ~Robert Frost from “Good-by and Keep Cold”
Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death. Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head. ~Jane Kenyon from her essay “Good-by and Keep Cold”found in A Hundred White Daffodils
For two months now, we’ve heard hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the ducks and geese that have stayed in the marshes through the winter.
The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, in addition to hawks and eagle chittering, the occasional dog barking, while the bluejays and squirrels argue over the last of the filbert nuts.
In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.
The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of last summer’s bound hay.
Yet today felt different – today, with unseasonably spring-like temperatures in early February, things feel about to change.
As yet, there have been no birdsong arias. I am bereft, listening for their blending musical tapestry waking me at 4 AM in the spring. And soon, the peeper orchestra from the swamps will rise and fall on the evening breeze.
It has been too, too quiet. I long for the music to return, not just the surround-sound of gunshot percussion, which is no melody at all.
I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades to return. It won’t be long.
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For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped And pigeon-collared.
For the splitter-splatter, guttering Rain-flirt leaves.
For the snub and clot of the first green cones, Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.
For the scut and scat of cones in winter, So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn Branch from branch.
But mostly for the swinging locks Of yellow catkins.
Plant it, plant it, Streel-head in the rain. ~Seamus Heaney “Planting the Alder”with an explanation of some of the poet’s poetic words here
Alder catkin, weightless as down, only blow it away and all changes utterly, and life, it appears, is not such a trifling matter, when nothing about it seems merely a trifle. …an alder catkin lies in my palm, and quivers, as if living.. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko from “Alder Catkin” translated by Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin
The alder tree branches are still winter-naked as their catkins start to emerge, other-worldly in appearance.
The swinging catkins search out every breeze to spread pollen as far as possible, engaging in serious alder-production business. It’s effective, as annually our pastures fill with baby alder trees, eager to form their own dense community in the wet ground of our lowlands.
In its desire to dominate the woodlands and allergies here in the northwest, the alder catkin is nothing to trifle with. Though we don’t want a field full of them, I can’t help but admire them this time of year for their bold color and knobby texture, reminiscent of the upholstery of my family’s well-loved 1950’s davenport sofa which converted to a bed for sick kids or visiting cousins.
Another world, another life-time full of dreams…
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Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain, Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain; Love lives again, that with the dead has been: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain, Jesus’ touch can call us back to life again, Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green. ~ John Macleod Campbell Crum – two stanzas from “Now the Green Blade Riseth”
…times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter– it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring. Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.
Our inward winters take many forms–failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them–protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance–we can learn what they have to teach us. Then, we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in winter, the most dismaying season of all. ~Parker Palmer from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Why did “Let It Go” from the Disney movie “Frozen” resonate as a universal pop anthem some ten years ago?
Maybe we needed the call to emerge from our dormancy, to reach out in our God-given ability to overcome challenges, despite everything the outward and inward winters blow at us.
I trust, from all I’ve learned in His Word — I have only gone underground temporarily and will soon emerge restored in renewal.
The cold never bothered me anyway? Yes, of course it did, but it is not the end of my story.
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