Remember God

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, snapshot-memories of my childhood sneak up on me. Today, I saw myself, nine years old, pumping my spindly legs back and forth on the old metal swing set left behind by previous owners of that house. I swung, face pointed towards the cornfield that flanked the back of the old chain-link fence. I faced the field out of fear. It seemed then, that the field might swallow me while I wasn’t looking.

I blink slow, and the memory expands.

The steady whine of the s-hooks that connect the swing to the crossbeam creak in cadence with each pass I make beneath the beam; a metallic metronome keeping time with the rhythm of my effort. The air is musty with the scent of decay.  My small sneakers dangle above the dirt patch where the grass has long been rubbed away from the repeated dragging of toes. The sun holds its two o’clock position, meanwhile in the background, the thrumming of a lawnmower rises and falls. The afternoon breeze runs chilly fingers between the drying corn stalks, then up my calves and across my shoulders. Fall elbows its way in. The beige stalks sway, pressing harder against the fence, pressing closer to me.

Autumn is a slow funeral procession ambling through my own backyard. Everything is drying and dying.

In this present time, many moons later, the waxing gibbous moon hangs like a golden egg in an inky sky. That frightened girl from my memory on the swing is old enough now to know that some deaths are perfectly perfunctory. She’s learned that sometimes, dying is an unavoidable side-effect of obedience. The natural Creation cannot resist the will of its Creator. New things will spring up from the places where the corn has dried. Resurrection is real, even when it feels like a fable. This mystery happens without fanfare, while we’re sleeping, while we’re chasing dreams, while we’re busy living perfectly ordinary lives.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24).

Facing Fear

Death is necessary, and knowing this helps, but it doesn’t eliminate the fear of what might be lost in transition. We live straddling eternity—one foot here on terra firma, the other touching heaven—we live in the tension of now-and-not-yet. ...

{Continue reading this post at The Cultivating Project: Autumn Issue}