Tag: Personal reflections

Have you ever been humbled by nature? By God’s creation – to be more precise? We live in a vast world, amidst a vaster cosmos, and if one becomes even for a moment thoughtful, one quickly realizes how small one is in comparison. It is tempting when one contemplates his smallness to become depressed, perhaps, or even insignificant. And yet…

The dancers carried her on a bier-like platform on their shoulders, a comical, but credible and somewhat eerie, life-sized bit of straw and black taffeta sculpture. Was she flying around the crowd or were we seeing a memory of how someone would be carried to the execution? I put the question aside.

You can’t just go to the garden and get what you want. Despite our consumer-coddled ways, everything has its season and time and you get what the garden gives. And if you think there’s a larger theological point hidden there about grace and God as the giver of good gifts, well, I’d suggest you’re right.

The turtles stay on the surface just long enough to snap up their sustenance before retreating to the darkness of the brackish shallows underneath the dock. After years of dropping bread to the turtles, I’ve realized that we do the same. We never stay topside in the sun for too long. We prefer the anonymity of the murk. We prefer to focus only on that bit of bread, a floating shadow above us.

“Whoever wrote that last prayer was a chump,” said Colin. A barky laugh escaped me. Never before had the words Jesus and chump come together in my mind. “Jesus made up that prayer. You think Jesus is a chump?” “Well, Mom, how can things possibly be the same on earth as they are in heaven?”