Last year, in this part of the world, a sudden drop in temperature killed a lot of buds on the fruit tress that had started to form too soon. The vineyards suffered severe damage as well. Most of the soft fruit and a lot of the grape crop for the Okanagan a was loss.
The orchards are not only pretty this spring, they are full of promise.
They remind me of hope deferred and hope restored.
Thank you, Lord.
Who can possibly ascend the mountain of the Eternal?
Who can stand before Him in sacred spaces?
Only those whose hands have been washed and hearts made pure…
Psalm 24:3,4 (The Voice)
Before we give real attention to the ways Jesus wants to transform our lives, we must reach a better understanding of his complete familiarity with our lives. He’s comfortable with us. He knows us intimately—even those things no one else knows. When we come to him with our needs, when we realize that we can bring our emptiness to him, we’re finally in a place where we can see his power at work in us. -Max Lucado
When God made the color purple, God was just showing off.
-Mae Jemison
Like many teenage girls, when I finally had a room of my own, I chose to decorate it in shades of purple. It fit the person in process that I was then. Purple takes the innocent sweetness of posie pink, the audacity of in-your-face magenta, the rage of raw red, the perfect peace of prairie lake blue, the hopeful ascension of sky blue and the deep reverence of mystical indigo and swirls them all around in an unsteady mix of hot and cold. If I look long enough, I can see the colours that make up purple dancing and spinning in a nervous partnership that leaves evidence they are never really fully committed to their roles. This is purple, the colour I chose for the first space I could call mine.
I may be a retired seventy-year old, but I’m not content to squeeze my accumulated years into a single conclusive expression. In my dreams I’m still a bewildered child, a wizened saint, a mischievous flirt, an introspective ponderer, an angry idealist, a conscientious servant, a lover of the unlovely, a reconciled plodder, and an every-which-way-at-once teen trying on each mood and personality in my cache before coming out of my room to run and catch the day. I wonder if, in ancient times, this may be why purple was a colour reserved for priests and royalty (aside from expense). Perhaps only those with the assumed freedom and time to appreciate the tenuous stability of paradox (and its influence on helpless bystanders) could wrap the heights of humility and the depths of pride around themselves in the ambivalent glory of purple and sally forth.
I too shall wear purple. It fits the person in process that I am now. I am, after all, with millions of others, part of a royal priesthood of believers. That’s qualification enough.
My thoughts at least, before I make the same to-do list for tomorrow as I made for today, prop my arthritic knee on my purple pillow, and turn off the light .
Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness, the nourishment of the mind with his truth, the purifying of the imagination of his beauty, the opening of the heart to his love, the surrender of the will to his purpose. -William Temple
“The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.” ~ Frederick Buechner
Sometimes, for some of us, a simple prayer of appreciation to the Creator of love and beauty for his goodness to us is as great a victory over self-centeredness as is sailing across the world to set a thousand captives free.
But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; for assuredly, I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. -Jesus (Matthew 13: 16, 17 NKJV)
Many people see with their eyes. Some see with their hearts. Fewer take the time to turn, and paying attention, see and hear with the Spirit.
The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope–and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend up on it) disappoint us.
-Walter Wangerin
Charis: Subject to Change 