Good morning…
With summer tipping into fall, my husband and I went to the first high school football game of the season. Lights. Crowds. A buzzing excitement. I could not help but snap a photo of the exuberance of heaven pouring into the ruggedness of earth.
Earth feels really rugged right now. There are a lot of rough things happening across our globe. The aftermath of another devastating earthquake in Haiti. The heartbreaking, chaotic crisis in Afghanistan. The worldwide pandemic impacting our schools and our hospitals, our churches and our choices. Raging fires and overwhelming floods. Ugly politics, racial violence, division galore. This feels like a really rugged season on earth.
Yet the beauty of seasons is that they naturally change and so do those open to God’s transformative power.
I feel drawn now to open a book we studied as a class in our living room a few years back, Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. Palmer shares a powerful perspective on the cycle of seasons in our everyday lives.
“Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think,” says Parker on page 96. “It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.”
“Transformation is difficult, so it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons,” Palmer continues on page 97. “Illuminated by that image, we see that we are not alone in the universe. We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we are open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth. We can, and we must – if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true.”
As the heavens break open to empower all of us-people on earth, might our communal healings grow more humane, more sustaining, more deep and more true? This fall football season, we unite in the hopeful request Jesus taught us to share with our Father: May your Kingdom come. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10, ISV).
…Sue…
