Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver is one of my favorites.  She is a wonderful observer of the natural world, and writes in a way that is both accessible and thought provoking.  Consider the following, titled "The Bleeding Heart":

I know a bleeding-heart plant that has thrived
for sixty years if not more, and has never
missed a spring without rising and spreading
itself into a glossy bush, with many small red
hearts dangling.  Don't you think that deserves
a little thought?  The woman who planted it
has been gone for a long time, and everyone
who saw it in that time has also died or moved
away and so, like so many stories, this one can't
get finished properly.  Most things that are
important, have you noticed, lack a certain
neatness.  More delicious, anyway, is to
remember my grandmother's pleasure when
the dissolve of winter was over and the green
knobs appeared and began to rise, and to cre-
ate their many hearts.  One would say she was
a simple woman, made happy by simple
things.  I think this was true.  And more than
once, in my long life, I have wished to be her.

     A plant that has outlived the woman who planted it.  The passing of time, and those who have moved through our lives along the way.  The memory of a beloved grandmother, and the delight she found in watching her plant blossom year after year.  Most of all, the capacity to find joy in the simple things... 

     There is an invitation here to pause amid our rush through time and take note of the little things, the simple blessings that are all around us.  And they are all around us; even in this pandemic, even amid the fears, discomforts and uncertainties of this season: the people God has brought into our lives; the tastes and textures of a well-prepared meal; a beautiful piece of music on our car radio; the white petals of a flowering dogwood.  So often we tend to get caught up in the big things like where we are heading or what it is that we are trying to do.  More often than not, however, the blessings are in the small ones, the ones we take for granted, the ones we pass on our way to something else.  We only begin to find them when we learn to pause long enough, like Oliver's grandmother, to actually notice. "Don't you think that deserves a little thought?"

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." (Mt. 6:28-29)