(Struggling here of late… I think I live the same days of my life over and over again. I am glad His mercies are ever new….)
Locks fell to the floor last night, strands of time, and I swept them up, threw them away.
Usually I toss the clumps of shorn hair from these four boys and one farming man to the winds, for birds to line nests with summer-bleached wisps. But the remnants of today’s front porch cutting were just quietly dumped in the garbage can. It wasn’t intentional, but the weariness of an insufferably long day had battered my thinking, and I just defaulted to the trash, instead of giving locks to the winged ones.
But what I really wanted to trim off, dispose of, was a few snippets of memory.
The day had fallen, sprained, limped along. And by the time we gathered for reading circle, the hurt of it all left me in tears. Children had tucked in close and I had opened Child’s History of the World and somewhere in a paragraph about Helles becoming one of the most influential country in the world, I brimmed and spilled.
Oldest left his science to see what I found so moving about that rocky outcrop jutting into the Mediterranean, and knitting girl paused her needles to ask why all this sadness, and the two younger boys said little but stilled from their sliding on and off the couch, and I just nodded reassuringly and kept reading though letters swam.
Because, really, how do you tell a circle of children gathered that you’re just too deeply broken to be fixed?
That you know in the marrow of your bones that if you were more tender, more joy-filled, more organized, more gracious, more endearing, more persuasive, more something ( yes, Christ-like), that we wouldn’t scrape up against each other so painfully, bruise each other so darkly. That if I led better, they’d follow better.
But I’m utterly impotent.
So tears silently fall and I muster a smile anyways (because yes, the children need that), stroke concerned cheeks, and nod, and we bravely read on.
And by day’s end, I just sweep it all up and let it go. Can any of this line a nest anyways?
When the last child’s tucked in and the last amen whispered, I stand in the still and remember what has come with the setting sun: “In the seventh month on the first of the month, you shall have a rest, a reminder by blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.” (Lev. 23:24 ESV)…
Tomorrow, the 18th, falls on the first of the Jewish seventh month, and “The trumpets will remind the Lord your God of his covenant with you. I am the LORD your God” (Nu. 10:10).
Tomorrow evening’s setting sun will bring the biblical feast of trumpets, what is known as “The Day of Remembrance.” And I want to cut it all away. It’s a day with memories I don’t want to remember.
On the first of the seventh (lunar) month, God’s people remember the past year with its wrongs and sins committed. The memories bring us low in the dust. (Or to tears in the midst of read alouds). At the end of a lamenting day, I understand the response of the Israelites on another Day of Remembrance. Ezra had read to them the words of the law on that first day of the seventh month and “all the people were weeping when they heard the words of the law.” Knowing how far you fall short does that. Cuts you to the quick.
“Then he said to them…Do not be grieved for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Neh. 8:10).
Remembering sins grieves, but doesn’t the joy of His covenantal, always, unwavering, right-to-the-end, love wipes away the tears? Our shortcomings cripple, but doesn’t the joy of the Lord strengthen these bent and weary bones?
Our memories of who we’ve been, how we’ve fallen, may sting, smart… spill heart’s well. But this Day of Remembrance is about our mutual remembering. God has memories too… of a covenant written in blood, a promise etched on palms, a love that makes all things new. A love that makes us new.
For “God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant…” (Exodus 2:24). “Is Ephraim My most precious son or a delightful child, that whenever I speak of him, I remember him more and more?” (Jer. 31:19). Yes, God has memories too… memories of His covenant not to forget or give up on His broken ones.
What comes with this Day of Remembrance? A New Beginning. The first of the seventh month is the Jewish New Year. God remembers that we are but dust and He ushers in new, unsullied time.
Doesn’t it make sense that autumn mark the opening of the new year? Up and down these gravel roads, combines are shearing fields of the harvest, cutting all away. Into these shorn fields, we’ll plant a new crop, though winter lurks. Across the countryside, farmers will drill in seeds, spring wheat. That wheat will germinate, sprouting through earth just before whites flakes fly. And then all will hibernate under heavy winter-down blankets, only to resurrect next spring. Autumn marks the New Year, the paring back of earth, to grow again.
This Feast of Trumpets, Jewish New Year, is celebrated when the New Moon begins, the time when night sky’s orb’s trimmed to a sliver.
Fresh start.
Jews celebrate this this “memorial of blasting” (Lev. 23:24), with new clothes, fresh haircuts.
Fresh haircuts… fresh starts….
On what the Torah calls “Yom Ha-zikaron,” the Day of Remembrance, tables are spread with white linens, and the holiday meal begins with apple slices dipped in honey.
Sweet fresh starts.
I slip into bed, draw close to Farmer Husband, toes finding his. The rain patters in the night, watering that fresh start of wheat out in our fields. And up the nape of his neck, I run a finger, up through closely shorn hair. I rest. Rest on the remembrance that the joy of the Lord will be our strength.
Morning brings a fresh start.
Father God, I praise You: behold You make all things new. Even us…
Related: Celebrating Feast of Trumpets
A repost from the archives
Photos: sweeping the locks off from the front porch
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