Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

It is a sunny day here.  Really, they do happen even in Pittsburgh which runs just behind Buffalo and Seattle for one of the most overcast cities in the nation.  From my perspective there are two clear benefits from that singular status: 1) having moved here from a state that had just been through seven years of drought, I love the lush vegetation and the sight of all that water in the Allegheny River; and 2) when we do get a sunny day, I’m much more likely to take note and give thanks rather than just take it for granted.
 
     On this particular day, my eyes are drawn to the windows and the beauty of what lies just beyond.  We are well into spring.  There is a definite tint of green on the trees now.  In fact, the dogwoods have been in full bloom for a week or two, and I can see the first hints of color on our azalea bushes.  I’m seeing people I’ve never seen before out for a walk to enjoy it all, and to get some fresh air in the midst of the quarantine.  Nature in every season is rather spectacular, but when it comes to this particular season it is almost like she is showing off.  Author Parker Palmer once wrote:

Spring in its fullness is not easy to write about.  Late spring is so flamboyant that it caricatures itself, which is why it has long been the province of poets with more passion than skill.  But perhaps those poets have a point.  Perhaps we are meant to yield to this flamboyance, to understand that life is not always to be measured and meted as winter compels us to do but to be spent from time to time in a riot of color and growth.

Late spring is a potlatch time in the natural world, a great giveaway of blooming beyond all necessity and reason – done, it would appear, for no reason other than the sheer joy of it.  The gift of life, which seemed to be withdrawn in winter, has been given once again, and nature, rather than hoarding it, gives it all away.  There is another paradox here, known in all the wisdom traditions: if you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it along.

     That, I think is what the best of us figure out along the way: that generosity holds the key to one of life's great joys.  Some people never get it.  They are still focused on building their towers.  But others, the lucky ones, discover what nature has known all along: the life-giving power of passing the gifts on.  Maybe they first found it as a child when they handed their mother a bouquet of carefully picked dandelions and saw the joy it brought to her face.  Or maybe it came later, as a teenager or as an adult, when they volunteered some time and energy for the sake of others in need.  Whenever it came, and whatever the form, what they discovered is one of life’s great secrets: in generosity we open our lives to a joy and meaning so deep and so pervasive, it almost feels selfish.

What gifts have you been given?  What do you have that you, too, might pass along?

“For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9)