Even Death He Makes Beautiful

Have you ever noticed

that trees are most beautiful

just before they sleep?

their impending rest

on display in gold and red hues

Massive quantities of leaves

ready to relinquish their grip

prepare for their journey to the ground

dust to dust

there to be transformed into food and fuel;

there is beauty and sadness here.

It’s hard not to look

to stare in wonder at it all;

what tender whispers blow through those leaves,

calling our name?

Inviting us to participate somehow.

Maybe we’re not all that different;

It seems the older we get, the more loss we experience

our grip turns weak and tentative

We’ve fallen too many times.

We all have to take the journey from branch to ground;

can we trust the wind to carry us to where we need to be?

can we trust that leaves will come back?

can we, like the leaves, trust the distance from branch to ground?

can we allow the wind to take us from our familiar grip?

can we abandon ourselves to the process of death and rebirth?

Jesus, Lord of the trees, knows.

He did this himself, entered into it with gusto

“for the joy set before him,” the old writer says

Can we see the joy in dying trees?

Trinitarian Joy.

If death is the ultimate abandonment

the ultimate relinquishment

the apex of letting go

I can’t help but think

that even death He makes beautiful.

Autumn Meditation

“Autumn is making its way across the prairie, and with it God’s silent and unseen artists turn the entire landscape into a magnificent work of art. The colors of the trees, the little touches added by the farmers – green and golden fields, hay bales put in just the right places. Cattle – red, brown, black, white; the little wild turkeys and their ever-watchful mothers just outside my window; indeed, never has there been an artist like God.

Thank you Creator God for the artistic changes of the seasons, for the beauty of your fascinating and ever changing creation! Come dear autumn, bathe our senses with your beauty and lay living nature gently to sleep in the arms of winter. There all may rest to be restored in the blazing beauty of spring!

(Norman Shawchuck, in A Guide to Prayer For All Who Walk With God, 2013: p.304)