Part of this week's prayers to Live!
In the cool of the morning, before farmer husband leaves for wheat fields and combine harvest, I collect seeds. Black flecks of hope sprinkle into my dish. The Sweet Williams blaze of mauves and fiery pinks has faded into a brittle brown. But cupped inside each dead bloom, promises rattle. I gather them up.
She did too, my mother-in-law who, only last week, returned to the dust, her spirit mounting to Him whence she came. These Sweet Williams now shaking seeds into the palm of my hand sprang from seeds that had, not so long ago, freckled her palm, seeds she once reaped from her own garden east of the gnarled apple trees. A whole jar—an ice-cream sundae topping jar---she filled with black specks, bursting fushias latent within. In her careful Dutch handwriting she had labeled, “Sweet William Seeds – Not Sundae Topping!” Sweet.
Such a store of seeds, I passed the jar onto my sister after planting ribbons of color promises in our garden. Now clusters of magenta, fringed in white, bloom in her beds too, and more seeds still remain in that jar on a shelf in the lawn shed. Seeds have a way of unpredictably scattering, lasting.
No, living, even bountiful, vibrant living, does not, in and of itself, warrant the effort of living. It's shatteringly true: babies stop breathing, bills crush, bodies crumble. Life, this side of Eden, scrapes, bruises, mangles. Sometimes we are not so excited to be here. And today, last week, this year, hasn’t been our favorite.
Sometimes, somedays, some of us, in the gutted-out ache of it all, ask, “Why live?”
And Mark Buchanan whispers in reply, “Life does not justify living. Eternity does.”
The harvest does, the collecting of the seeds. This is why we wildly guzzle down living. Not because it is an end, a satiating, a fulfillment in and of itself. But because in the living well, we yield well.
This living, and how we animate these days, this skin, matters not for now, but to the Lord of the Harvest who reaps for the forever.
Four days after we let the rose petals slip from our warm fingertips and onto that cold coffin, we fill all the swings at the park with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all her little ones: Josiah, Micah and Abigail, Malakai, Levi, Shalom, Katie and Benjamin, Sawyer and Hope. Behind the swings, the backdrop of the park, I see her house, her front door. Those little legs pumping up into the sapphire sky, her blood pumps, pulses, through those veins, this laughter.
Seeds. Bursting life latent within. Yielded promises.
I gather them up.
