Bloom Season

Spring is here. Where I live, spring is basically summer, but still. It is the season for blooms. In the several pots on my deck and patio, flowers are blooming. Some have just begun to show their colors after the cold (all right, cool) weather, and others are fading now that the heat is kicking in. One planter in particular is preparing to showcase a blaze of color within the next few days: in it are a gerbera daisy and a geranium side-by-side, their blooms to be deep orange and hot pink. These plants came through the winter, to my surprise, and I am excited to see their little buds and the small beginnings of petals.

Enter my daughters, nearly-four and one. They have a wading pool on the deck. They have a hose with gushing water. They have buckets. Do they want to play with these things? No. They want to pick flowers. 

At first, I ask them not to. What a reasonable request, right? The few blooms on the geranium are gone within about three trips of my one-year-old from the plant to the pool, where she is dropping the flowers one at a time into the water. They look pretty when they float. My last hope is the buds on the geranium that haven't started to open yet (they aren't showing any pink, so maybe my daughters won't see them). The single bloom on the gerbera daisy, I know, is doomed.

The gerbera daisy has a blooming pattern that I have found requires patience. It produces about one to three flowers at a time, and each bud takes what seems a painstakingly long amount of time to open completely. Once the blooms open, they remain for a while, making them worth the wait, but when they fall, there is a long period of waiting again before the next round of blooms appears.

On my daisy plant now is a single bloom that has barely begun its work: tiny petals extend from the center, pale orange and narrow, like squat embroidery needles. I know that in a few days' time, the petals will stretch, unfold, and deepen to their full orange color. I am looking forward to seeing the flower. But my children do not understand this expectation.

I try to explain it to my older girl. Maybe she can understand, but she doesn't seem very interested. She's more interested in the here-and-now (I can't blame her; she's only almost four). She is learning to be patient, but she would rather pluck the flower now, early, to play with it, than wait for it to bloom fully. 

In my frustration at the loss of most of my blooms and potential blooms, I have a choice: I can get upset, yell, and sweep the girls up and take them inside, ending play time with the fury of my dragon-mom fiery wrath (dragon-mom is a real thing), or I can patiently let the children be children. They are exploring. They want to enjoy examining the flowers, picking each petal off and feeling it in their fingers. They want to see how the petals look in the water. They want to play with pretty things. Their actions are not malicious. 

As I sit in the lawn chair, trying to enjoy the outside play time as much as my daughters apparently are, I remember words from Paul David Tripp's Parenting, the book I'm reading with my care group right now. He asks, "Do physical things get in the way of, or create needless tension in, your parenting?" I take a deep breath and look at the flowers. They are, indeed, physical things. They are objects, not people. My daughters are much more valuable than the orange and pink blooms. I can relax. This summer, the world will not come to an end, even if every single bloom is plucked early from my plants. And I doubt even my industrious children could manage that feat.

My children are learning patience, and so am I. Tripp writes that "[i]n every moment as you are parenting your children, the heavenly Father is parenting you." I need to hear this truth: I need God as my parent every bit as much as my children need me as a parent (I suppose even more so). God is teaching me to be patient and gracious with my children, and I am a slow learner. He reminds me here on the deck, as my girls pluck flowers, that the true blooms to wait for are not growing in planters. They are running around naked in the backyard; they are little now, but will be grown-up some day (sooner than I imagine), their deepest, brightest colors yet to be seen.

Petals plucked and dropped on the dirt in the pot.

How to Survive Your Cold (and Enjoy It, Too)

The cold and flu season is in full swing. Where I live, close to the Texas Hill Country, it has also been the season for cedar pollen, leading to what for many is comparable to getting a severe cold or even flu-like symptoms, called around here "cedar fever." The dreaded pollen can cause such terrible allergies that last and last until finally they develop into sinus infections, fevers, sore throats, coughing, congestion that blocks ears: the works.

As I battled with my most recent bout of the cedar fever, a sinus infection, and took care of my two young daughters, who also had fevers and runny noses, I struggled to keep a positive attitude. When everything was sore and two small children were cranky for days (and nights!) on end, who could really blame me? Well, the truth is that it would have helped my family and me to survive the sickness without all the grumpiness if I had simply practiced thankfulness. Wait, thankfulness? For infections? Yes. Thankfulness, even for infections.

According to research, as discussed by Amy Morin in Psychology Today, practicing thankfulness has been shown to improve mental, psychological, emotional, and even physical health. Clearly it is in our best interest to try gratefulness in place of grumbling. However, what about a cold is there to be grateful for?

This is where a bit of discipline and creative thinking come into play. In 1000 Gifts, Ann Voskamp argues that thankfulness is at times a sacrifice. In other words, it's hard to do, but worth the challenge. I've written more in-depth about the sacrifice of thanksgiving elsewhere, and giving thanks through difficult circumstances is on my mind a lot. Though it takes self-control to give thanks instead of gripe, I can think of several ways I could (at least in theory!) give thanks for sickness.

When I'm sick, I try to slow down and let my body rest as much as possible. I can be thankful for the slower schedule, even though it might be forced on me against my will. If I have a chance, I can even take a hot bath (the steam is great for congestion!) and relax a bit, maybe with a drop or two of eucalyptus essential oil to add an invigorating scent that reportedly helps clear congestion. When my kids are napping, I can nap. I can be thankful for yummy, hot soup (maybe my husband will bring me pho!). Trying to find small things to enjoy during a cold is one way to be thankful.

More importantly, perhaps, getting sick reminds me that I am not in control of my own health, ultimately. Yes, I can control the food I eat, my exercise, and - to some extent, being a mom of littles - how much sleep I get. But I cannot stop myself from getting a cold, no matter how many elderberry gummies I chew per day. God takes the opportunity when I get sick to remind me that I am frail. Yet despite the frailty and relative lack of importance of my life (considering by comparison God, the maker of the universe), He still cares for me intimately. My motherhood matters. My personal dreams and goals matter. My health matters to Him, who showed compassion for the sick when He walked the earth (and still does today). When I'm sick, it is easier to see both how small I am and also how my simple, small life matters to God. After all, the little things stand out more to me when I'm sick: the taste of soup, the feeling of a hot bath, the smell of eucalyptus, even being able to breathe! All of these little things are gifts from a God who created my body and said it was good.

So, I can try to be thankful, though it's not easy, when sickness strikes. And when it's through, I can be thankful again that I have a healthy body. Sick or healthy, life itself is such a gift!

The Butterflies Are Here

"The butterflies are here!" I commented to the young man helping me load groceries into my car.

"Yeah, passing through on their annual migration," he responded. "I always hate to see them in front of the car, though." I knew what he meant. My husband had commented about the same issue. The Snout Nosed butterflies are on their way from Canada to Mexico, and have been passing through San Antonio this week. They fly so thickly across highways that it's impossible to commute without killing some. My husband and the man at the grocery store felt dismayed and slightly guilty about this fact, though it's unavoidable. "Survival of the fittest, I guess," said my grocery helper, shrugging the small worry off.

Yes, many of the butterflies don't make it to their destination (although whether "fitness" has anything to do with which ones are hit by cars, I doubt). But the man's reference to naturalistic evolutionary and social theory got me thinking. His comment and the concept itself are attempts to explain suffering and death, the basic fact that not all creatures survive, which for some reason makes us feel, well, sad.

But why? Why do we feel sad that some butterflies get squashed on their journey? Many more of them surely reach the final destination and are able to replenish the population of the species to return again to the same place the following year. Overall, what is the death of some butterflies, when the population as a whole is fine? If all of the butterflies survived, they would probably create some kind of overpopulation problem in an ecosystem somewhere anyway.

If a naturalistic explanation for the world and life were truly sufficient, then our response to the butterflies would not make any sense. Indeed, where would this response even come from? The emotions of guilt and sadness at the inconsequential loss of some insects could serve no purpose in terms of evolutionary development. Rather, our response reveals that there is a standard of what is good, an ideal that we are somehow programmed to seek. When we see death, especially the sudden quashing of fragile creatures on their seemingly hopeful and harrowing journey across a continent, we recoil. The situation seems horrible to us because we sense that something isn't right. In an ideal world, all of the beautiful butterflies would make it, and then they wouldn't cause an overpopulation problem; everything and every creature would live in perfect balance with everything and everyone else.

It is relatively easy to see how the beauty in the world points us to God. After all, if God does exist, we expect He is good and would make good things. The intricate patterns and delicate strength of the tiny butterfly's wings present themselves to us as belonging to the purview of a great Designer who knows much more and has more creative power than we humans could ever presume to possess. The thought that random mutations in the absence of any informed plan could produce such wonders might strike us as comical, outlandish, ludicrous, like assuming all of the works of Shakespeare were produced not by an intelligent author but by the random shaking of ink bottles against paper. It takes a great and blind faith, indeed, to believe in such a thing.

But what of the brokenness of the butterfly wings smashed into the grills of our cars? Surely the existence of such ugliness makes us question whether a good God exists or is in control of anything. Much worse brokenness than dead butterflies often crowds into our lives or the lives of those we know or hear of in the news. It is a natural first response to question the existence of a good God under these circumstances, but the very fact that they repulse us actually gives us a clue that a good God does exist. If the universe existed without a designer outside of it, it would be in a sort of moral vacuum. There would be no standard outside of the natural world itself to differentiate good and bad, right and wrong, or beauty and brokenness. The natural world hardly gives us any clues as to why we have such a negative response to death; after all, isn't death "natural," and in many cases, even necessary? According to the natural order, then, we should accept it without qualms. So we must look outside of the natural universe to make sense of the fact that we respond to death as though something were inherently wrong. We sense something about the universe is broken, which implies that perhaps once it was, and we long for it to be again, whole.

In That Hideous Strength, one of his space trilogy novels, C. S. Lewis argues that even if the natural universe is all that exists, it would be better to fight against the nastiness and insanity within it than to side with all of its brutish baseness. Mark Studdock, a man driven by the desire to belong, finds himself fighting against an attempt at what essentially boils down to brainwashing by the "elites" he's been trying to get close to throughout the whole story:

But after an hour or so this long, high coffin of a room began to produce on Mark an effect which his instructor had probably not anticipated. . . . the built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware . . . of this room's opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else - something he vaguely called the "Normal" - apparently existed. 

Mark quickly realizes that no matter what the elites say with their "scientific point of view," he wants to be on the side of the "Normal." Later, when asked to stamp on a crucifix, Mark refuses, asserting in his mind that Christ had been forsaken by a God who turned out not to exist, and he wonders, "If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side?" In this brilliant philosophical and psychological depiction of the common human experience of the clash between an ideal standard of good and a broken reality, Lewis posits that at the very least our experience shows us a standard does, in fact, exist (the "Normal"). Without an objective standard somehow ingrained in us, we would not be able to recognize the crookedness of the world.

The next step is determining where the standard originates, and the crucifix scene, of course, provides a clue as to where Lewis finds the answer: the God of Christianity and the Bible. It is reasonable to explain our awareness of a standard by the existence of a God who reveals the standard (by being Himself the standard for all perfection), and who created us with an inherent awareness of it. It also makes sense to say that if the universe was created by a good God, and was, at one point, good, then we can understand why now we question the presence of broken and terrible things; they are broken and terrible not by design, and they were not meant to be this way. When we startle and weep at brokenness, ugliness, and death, we agree with the "Normal"; we take sides with God against the brokenness rather than accepting it as part of an amoral and nonsensical universe containing no explanation within its own boundaries for the existence of any standard of morality or even for life itself.

The beauty in the world - its landscapes, delicious foods, self-sacrificial love, butterfly wings - reveals the beauty of a Designer who is good. But the brokenness of the world, and the fact that we perceive the brokenness as such, also point us to God. In the face of the brokenness and our grieving, let us recall that He even entered into our world and partook of its brokenness, becoming broken Himself and overcoming that brokenness, in order that all things might one day be restored and made whole and beautiful again.

The tiny specks are butterflies; the picture cannot do justice to the true effect of walking through what feels like swarms of butterflies all heading in the same direction across our neighborhood!

Pruning

In my small group at church we've talked about pruning a couple of times now. In John 15:1-2, Jesus says, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." The book our group is reading together, Trusting God by Jerry Bridges, discusses this passage a bit as a way of explaining some of the adversity that Christians encounter. Adversity is a way for God to "prune" us so we can become more fruitful. Even though pruning is not a fun experience, we are supposed to be glad when we recognize it because we know God has good plans in mind.

I know that pruning can take various forms. Perhaps God takes away an opportunity to do something I was looking forward to so I learn to rejoice in Him. Perhaps He makes getting enough sleep an impossibility for a while so I learn to rely on Him more. Perhaps He takes away my familiar surroundings and moves me to a new place with new people and a new job so I learn that my true identity is based in Him and not in my circumstances.

We moved to San Antonio just over a year ago, and I became a stay-at-home mom almost two years ago. Those two changes quickly removed me from settings where I felt comfortable and purposeful. I had friends there. It seemed to me that I was someone there. When I started staying at home with my little one and no longer had those stable routines about me, I felt like a dried-up, cut off version of myself. I didn't recognize myself or my purpose anymore.

When we moved into our new house, there was a mystery bush near the fence in the backyard underneath the shade of an oak tree. It was quite tall, about as tall as my husband. During winter it was just branches, but in summer it was covered with dark, pointed leaves. Finally this year my dad identified it for us as a Mexican fire bush. He hadn't recognized it the first summer because it had never bloomed. He told us that it needed sun in order to produce its bright orange flowers. We could move it and hope it started blooming if we took the trouble to dig out its root ball and dig a new hole for it in a sunny spot.

Well, a few weeks ago my husband got out the trimmers and shovel and started to cut and dig. First he pruned the long branches of the shrub so it would not be so unwieldy. Then he cut a wide circle in the soil around the base of the plant. Soon he got to the roots and discovered that those things were massive. We don't know how long some of the roots were because eventually he had to stop digging and simply chop the roots with loppers in order to get the bush out of the ground. The biggest root was about five inches across where he cut it. Finally, after much sweat and probably a few blisters, he was able to move the bush to its new spot, also dug out by him, in a sunnier place. A few days later, my husband reflected, "You know, after moving that fire bush, I feel somehow like it's more mine."

The bush still looks puny right now. It hasn't grown back to its former height, and it has yet to put on greenery for the summer, but we are hopeful that in its new spot it will produce not only pretty leaves, but gorgeous blooms, too. Maybe it will attract butterflies and hummingbirds. It could never have done those things in the old place.

When my Father, the infallible gardener, moves me to a new place, cutting off roots and taking away nice long branches that seem to be doing just fine, I can trust that His purpose is good. He plans for me to be more effective and beautiful, and to bring more glory to Him in the new place. Even if I feel less fruitful for a time immediately after the pruning, I know the end result will be a more abundant life than what was before. Also, as He puts me in new situations that cause me to recognize that my significance comes from Him, He is making me more His own.

Hold Her Hand

The Texas mountain laurels are blooming right now. Full-grown, they are gorgeous trees covered with purple blossoms that make all the air smell like grape sweet tarts. Wouldn't you want to be so beautiful if you were a tree?

photo courtesy of Matt Kolodzie

A few weeks ago, I held my daughter's hand as she took tenuous steps along the rock border of our small raised garden bed. Seeing her watch her feet and carefully step so slowly reminded me of something that happened to me about seven years ago, when I was in grad school and feeling extremely unsure of myself as a person. During the Christmas break I visited my mom and dad and went to their church for the Christmas Eve service. There in the peaceful sanctuary, when it was time for Communion, we had a silent, individual prayer time. My prayer went something like:

God, I know I need to be more like the woman who twirls around in big, flowing skirts at the top of bright green hills with blue skies all around her, her face shining as she looks up and laughs at the clouds. She's so exuberant and full of life. I need to be like that, and I'm not. I don't trust You enough. I'm so anxious all the time. 

Suddenly, in the midst of my insecure ramblings, a vivid picture came into my mind. It was a picture of a small girl wearing dark-colored clothes that fit her well but were not flowing skirts. The girl was walking along a pathway that wasn't lit very well, and the whole background was fairly dark, too. The girl was holding a hand, though. She was taking steps slowly while holding a hand whose owner was not visible. God reassured me with this vivid picture by telling me that, though I was going slowly and might not have an outgoing, exuberant personality, I was trusting Him and walking faithfully as the woman He made me to be. That careful woman was just as beautiful as the spinning woman on the hill.

When my daughter walked along the garden border taking slow, careful steps, she was trusting me to catch her and to guide her in this new adventure she'd just discovered. She was being completely herself and completely lovely in doing so. If she'd been running along recklessly, I'd have been a bit frustrated, and she probably would have hurt herself.

Some people are quick to settle in, establish "roots," find their niches, make friends, and adjust to new roles. Some are slower. The Texas mountain laurel is notorious for being a slow-growing tree that may not bloom for several years after being planted. We have one in our yard that we planted almost right away when we first moved to our new house in our new city. It's been a year now, and there has barely been any new visible growth at all, and certainly no blooming. My husband told me just the other day, when I was feeling a bit down regarding my ability to feel settled in my life as a new mom in a new place, that I was like the mountain laurel, slow to become established, but with potential for beautiful blossoms after a time.

Looking closely at our little slow-growing tree, I can see some brighter green new leaves at the ends of some of the darker green branches that have been there for a while. When I look closely at my life, I can see improvements and growth - perhaps small, but there nonetheless. Praise God, who always holds my hand, for causing all kinds of growth, whether fast or slow, big or small, joyous in purple blooms or deliberate in tender stems and leaves!

our small mountain laurel

Dillard and Hopkins on the Mystery of Beauty

In December I finished reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In her first of two afterwords, written eight years apart, Dillard calls this book a "theodicy," which is a "defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil" (Merriam-Webster) (I had to look it up). The book takes on this task, albeit in a complicated and indirect way. Throughout it, Dillard closely examines the natural world, observing and commenting on its intricacies, curiosities, beauties, and horrors. She certainly doesn't shy away from looking at the problem of evil, but that's a post for another day. She also expounds on some of the most glorious and abundantly good aspects of nature, one of which is birdsong. Specifically, Dillard raises the question, "Why do birds sing?" Scientists still haven't figured it out, she says. So she posits her own theory and invokes a poem ("As Kingfishers Catch Fire") by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to do so:

It could be that a bird sings I am sparrow, sparrow, sparrow, as Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests: 'myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.' (Dillard)

Dillard goes on to clarify that she believes the proper question we should ask is not what the birdsong means, but why it is so beautiful. To Dillard, "beauty is something objectively performed" - in other words, it exists whether we see it or not, and its existence is not subject to the feelings of those who look at it. However, she also claims that beauty is a "language to which we have no key"; we cannot figure out what the "code" of beauty is attempting to communicate.

Strange supposition for a person writing a theodicy. I think Dillard's unspoken thesis of this passage is that the answer to the question "Why is birdsong beautiful" is that God exists, He is beautiful, and He created birds. The answer is implied, or else Dillard is remaining agnostic on this point. Maybe my own strong views on the subject are leading me astray in my reading of the passage. In any case, why would a woman setting out to defend God's goodness claim that beauty is indecipherable? Especially, why would she claim this just after bringing up a poem like "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," one that clearly supposes quite a particular key to the mystery of beauty and spells out what that key is?

Dillard quotes only just under two lines from Hopkins' poem, and fails to reference the major point that Hopkins is making with the entire poem, though his point could be taken as a direct answer to Dillard's question about the meaning of the beauty of birdsong (or any other beauty). The poem reads:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells 

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's 

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; 

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, 

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

I say móre: the just man justices; 

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; 

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — 

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, 

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Hopkins lists several things in the poem, each of which "speaks itself": kingfishers, dragonflies, stones, strings (perhaps instruments), bells. Indeed, "each mortal thing" exists to be itself, he says. In the second part of the poem, Hopkins extends the list to specifically include man, though of course humans already fall under the rubric of "each mortal thing." In the end, men exist to exhibit Christ, or, put another way, to reveal God. If men bear the image of God, as Hopkins believed, then this reflection of God "through the features of men's faces" makes sense. Men are like mirrors showing who God is to anyone who takes a moment to look and see.

I would argue that, for Hopkins, not only do the humans reveal God, but so do the animals and even inanimate objects listed earlier in the poem. First, as Hopkins moves from part one to part two of the poem, I believe he is getting more precise, adding more clarity, expounding ("I say more"). Second, taken with other poems of his, this one falls right in line with his frequent theme that the beauty in the natural, created world (and also in beautiful, man-made objects) reveals to us the nature of God. Take as one example a couple of lines from "God's Grandeur": "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" (1). Despite the mess humans have made of things (5-8), "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" (10). Because God is still involved with his creation (13-14), His creation still reflects His beauty and reveals His nature. Take also the poem "Pied Beauty," in which Hopkins gives glory to God for the varied beauty He has created. After listing several things given by God to the earth and to man, including birds, fish, cows, landscapes, work, and even sounds and tastes, Hopkins concludes that all of these things "[God] fathers-forth whose beauty is past change" (10). Because God, with unchanging beauty, has created all of the beauty we experience in the world, we should "Praise Him" (11). It is clear from these and many other of Hopkins' poems that for Hopkins, beauty is from God, reveals to us God's beautiful nature, and therefore calls us to worship God.

Did Dillard miss this larger point in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"? Or does she simply choose to ignore it and leave it out of her own writing? I am not sure. But to anyone looking for a clear defense of God's goodness and omnipotence despite the evil in the world, I suggest a reading of Hopkins. Dillard and Hopkins have something in common: both write with intensity in response to their observations of nature. However, while Dillard's defense of God is more elaborate and complex than Hopkins', it is also less direct, and I find that Hopkins' often exuberant language creates a sense of the thrill and awe we humans can experience when we observe nature with the Creator in mind.