I know not what occupied me those long hours of the nailing.
But sometime this past week, the woods rang with the pounding of the hammer, echo over the hills, and I must have been busy. Oblivious, deaf.
Spigots, they were, driven into the hearts of naked wood. Wood lined with summers known, winters lived, now exposed in chill of mid-March sun.
Without a sound, the woods wept, sap running down. News of their cry only reached the world when smoke signaled, wisps of drifting grey wandering lost among the grey trunks, there, from beyond the far knoll.
I catch my breath.
Is it time already?
Some trees lie chopped, old wood in gold light.
They’re sacrifice for the furnace, for the fire stoked seven times hotter.
For crackling heat to turn the woods clear tears to light gold too.
That lifeblood, clear and pure, drains way, only to darken thick and rich over the crucible, so that we might taste and be satisifed, taste and see that it is good…
Do we ever get over the wonder?
Spring stirs in the woods, and Easter stirs in my heart.
What flows from the Tree runs sweet.
We bottle it up and all year we drink,
fully supplied.
“He was crucified outside the city gates—that is where he poured out the sacrificial blood that was brought to God’s altar to cleanse his people.”
~ Hebrews 13:12 MSG
Related: Never let the Gospel Get Smaller @ Desiring God
Photos: a wander through the sugar shanty making syrup from the woods across our fields.
