Lovely things

The first bee of the year helping himself to my rosemary flowers. He is more than welcome.

The above lines are from Sara Teasdale's small poem, “Night”.¹ When I first read it to my children years ago, it was a moment of recognition. A swirl of unarticulated feeling, a swirl I had felt my whole life - or, since Christ had saved me - suddenly given shape and form in three little lines. I have never forgotten them. As the kids say, they live rent free in my head.

There is a hymn that also perfectly verbalizes this experience:

Heav'n above is softer blue, Earth around is sweeter green!
Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen;
Birds with gladder songs o'erflow, flowers with deeper beauties shine,
Since I know, as now I know, I am His, and He is mine.

It sounds naïve or rosy-glassed but it isn't. It is a shift in foundations, a shift in perspective in the way of blindness to sight. Perspective can change in an instant or by slow degrees over time and much like my salvation (I cannot point to a single moment as The Moment), this perspective has come by slow degrees. Since Christ pulled me out from the kingdom of darkness and transferred me to His blessed kingdom of light, the lines of Teasdale’s poem express precisely the attitude that has been slowly growing in me toward the world and everything in it, to the point that it's almost habit now. Years of running in the same track has created ruts of thought. I veer, almost without effort (almost), toward expecting goodness and mercy to follow me all the days of my life. And I have learned the very important truth that this goodness and mercy usually shows up in ways I would never have expected.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the trajectory I was on when Christ intervened in my life. This attitude - this expectation of finding goodness somewhere everywhere - is one of those beauties he has given me for the ashes of my life before I knew Him. It is not positive thinking and I stress this because it sure sounds like positive thinking. It is more than that. It is the altering of currents, it is causing the sun to stand still, it is tectonic; it is not a gloss of “hope for the best” over darker sentiments. I was buried in ashes of selfishness, depression, fear, bitterness, etc. General darkness pervaded my mind. I feared everything and expected everything to go to s#*÷ at some point. I also had an attitude of entitlement and thought the world was against me if I didn't get what I wanted or thought I needed. But as I have walked with Christ through the years, He has dusted more and more of those gloomy ashes off. I might not - will not - ever be totally free of them while I live, but I know whatever ashes still cling to me at the end of my life, my trip through Jordan will wash them off. And then there is the final fire to burn up all the rest.²

Anyways, that's all beside the point. But also, I wouldn't be writing this without it, so maybe it is the point. Either way, in the spirit of Teasdale's lines, I want to share a few lovely things that came into my days recently as a way of praising our God who litters this world and our lives with lovely things, and as an encouragement to you and me to keep looking for them.

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Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30 in E

When I heard this on our local classical radio last week, I felt like all of spring was put into a single sonata. Beethoven was the first composer I ever obsessed over. When I heard Moonlight Sonata in 7th grade, I was immediately and thoroughly head over heels. I spent my dishwasher wages on boxed cd sets of his works (back then, not so cheap. Insert joke about feeling old here) and listened to favorites over and over. I haven't listened to him much since high school. The occasional symphony or concerto with the kids when we were having morning time but that’s it. I have spent this week listening to more of him and I feel that old love stirring. Ludwig's still got it.

And this: Ralph Vaughan Williams' English Folksongs for Piano and Cello. The song at 3:50 is my favorite but the whole thing is 9+ minutes of loveliness. Ralph Vaughan Williams is to me in my 40s what Beethoven was to me in my teens. “Lark Ascending”— nuff said.

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The first ladybug of the year was spotted on Saturday. Ha! Spotted. Pun not intended but I'm not sorry it happened.

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A friend visited the National Gallery in London this week and sent some photos of paintings he saw. My second daughter who is our family’s resident visual artist mentioned that one of her favorite paintings was housed there. I had seen it before but I had not really seen it. It is beautiful.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche

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Answered Prayers

The Starbucks has a steady stream of customers coming in, picking up orders, leaving immediately. There are a few of us who stay to sip and chat, a few who sit staring and typing, headphones hissing, and at one table, a silver-haired lady is crocheting what looks like cartoon animal legs while two silver-haired veterans (their hats give them away) face her, furrowed hands curling around their cups, all three smiling and sipping and chatting.

The door opens and a young mother comes in pulling a wagon in which two small boys are bouncing and barely containing their carbonated energy - they seem ready to burst if they are left corked much longer. As she gets in line to order, looking tired in the way that every mother recognizes, the woman crocheting the stuffy bottom goes out to her car and comes back in with two bright blue handmade crocheted stuffed floppy puppies, each almost 3 feet tall, and asks the mother if she can give them to the boys.

Now, I know this will sound dramatic, but I promise, everything and everyone in the coffeeshop for a small second stopped - even those bubbling boys. They are absolutely still, staring at the woman bearing those adorable gifts. The mother says yes, of course. Everyone in the place smiles, even the man with the headphones and the laptop glances up and grins, even the barista at the window, possibly - but I'm not sure - even the lady on the other side of the window receiving her large foamy drink, and especially the two veterans at the woman's table. They are smiling the smiles of the experienced. They have obviously seen this before.

The mother of course offers to pay and the woman of course shakes her head. The mother asks if she has a business. The woman laughs and shakes her head again. She smiles at the boys, gives a small wave, and goes back to her two veterans and her yarn, and yes, it is definitely legs she is crocheting. They are identical in shape to the two pairs she just gave away.

The mother stands slightly dazed, looking around, making eye contact with those of us who are also dazed and smiling. She is laughing in that shocked “Can you believe this just happened?!” way. We all feel that way. Then we all go back to our chatting and sipping.

Until another mother with another toddler walks in.

This time it is a 3-foot crocheted floppy creamy beige-and-white stuffed cow the woman gives away. The little girl, now holding a toy cow nearly as big as herself, seems just as dazed as her mother, but not nearly as dazed as the rest of us. Two unexpected acts of kindness in a single quarter of an hour? What is happening?! Is Christ’s return imminent?? For a small second, the world slows again. The two boys in the wagon watch the giving, again sitting perfectly still (mothers of small boys will understand the weight of this description), and then turn back to their puppies with fresh enthusiasm. The toddler with the cow wanders around the café, stops at the table with the silver-haired fairy godmother and stares at this unexpected benefactress. I wonder if Dante might have looked at Beatrice with the same expression of unmitigated wonder as she stood before him resplendent in light and glory and goodness not her own. I suspect yes.

Here is the rest of the story: my friend had to go talk to this woman who was so generous and we find out that this marvelous crafter simply loves making these animals and cannot stop. “I tried to sell them at fairs and things - waste of my time. So now I just give them away. I mean,” she laughs as she pulls up some pictures on her phone to show us, “my craft room is full of them. I have got to get rid of them. So I carry them in my car and give them to moms with little kids.” She paused and then said, “But you know what's funny?” She leans in close, “I don't really like kids at all.”

I had to talk to the young mother. I try to encourage moms of little ones when I see them. It is a hard job and a hard season. I remember when my five were all small amd squirrely. Kindness from strangers felt like water in the desert some days. So my friend and I both told her that she was doing a great job and wasn't that amazing what happened? The mother said, “Yes! Actually, I had just been praying on the way over here. We had kind of a rough morning. These guys,” gesturing to the two wagon-bound boys, “are so full of energy. I love them but…” My friend broke in - “It’s exhausting, I know. I had six and my friend had 5. It’s tough.”

“Yes!” She lit up. “You guys understand! And I had just dropped my other son at school, which is hard, too. So I was walking and just asking the Lord to help me. And then that woman just gave those toys to my boys! But you know, God always seems to do that - when I am having a tough day, He sends something my way to lift me up.”

We spoke to the young mother first. When the woman who gave the stuffed animals away told us she didn’t like kids, I laughed and told her it didn’t really matter because God had used her to answer the mother’s prayer. She was stunned. What do you say to that? It is one thing to have a prayer answered. It is another to find out that what you did less out of selflessness and more to get some clutter out of your craft room was made an answer to a prayer.

I don't have any morals to draw for you. After that experience, I am left thinking about the wonderfully choreographed dance of Providence. Graceful, inimitable, complex. It is a mystery how He does it, but it is a fact - He answers our prayers. Sometimes with silence. Sometimes with, “No.” Sometimes with, “Be patient.” But always there is an answer.

Sometimes prayer itself, coming to our Father in an attitude of need and with an honest confession of weakness, is a kind of answer. Or the beginning of one.

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Last thing. I have been reading lately about the Korean War and I wondered what poems came out of that conflict. I have been thinking about this poem since I read it. It's from the collection Brother Enemy:

Park Yangkyun’s “Flower”:

At whose request have you bloomed on this wasteland
where men slaughtered men, you nameless flower
which confronts the sky with your fragile sweetness?
How can you, a delicate plant standing on a sunny
road under the blue Heavens, try to efface, with your
ineffable smile upon your frail stalk, the deafening din
of cannon roars and bomb explosions and yells and
bloodbaths that shook the earth to its axis?

The image of a flower blooming in the blood-soaked earth…

And that a flower could bloom where such atrocities have taken place…

And that flowers do bloom everyday where horrors have happened…

The audacity of life to continue and the hope of healing in a single flower…

Those are some of the things the poem gives me to consider.

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We live in a universe of meaning because it is a universe made not chanced and made by the Triune God Who infuses everything with meaning. Everything He has made speaks of Him. His fingerprints are everywhere. This is why I believe lovely things are never far from us, even in places of darkness and despair. Darkness and despair are not the whole story. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”³ The frail flower blooming on an earth that was “shook to its axis,” not by one war but by countless wars and oceans of bloodshed and the roar of hell and humanity uniting to murder the Son of God — the frail flower living and blooming then casting its seed to the ground so that more flowers grow; a garden, even — this is the emblem of the True Story.

I wasn’t planning to post this on Good Friday. I started this last week, but life being what it is, my final edit is happening now. I’m going to say it’s Providential. It fits with the truth of today. The darkest day is not the end. If Christ is not risen from the dead, then all this is for nothing and means nothing and we have nothing. But He is and that changes everything.

Thanks for making it this far. This post is a bit of a hodge-podge but hopefully there is something here that encourages you or that you can take and consider. I hope you find time to look for a lovely thing today. It truly is not far — it will never be far.

Mt Rainier on Tuesday afternoon

1. Night

Stars over snow

And in the west a planet

Swinging below a star –

Look for a lovely thing and you will find it.

It is not far –

It never will be far.

2. 1 Corinthians 3:15

3. 1 Corinthians 15 - read the whole thing.