Sounds of Spring

The sun warms the grass and the buds. I stumble over furniture for lack of sleep. I set my clocks forward yesterday and I will adjust for a couple of weeks.

Not really that big of a change, the daylight savings time affects me mightily every year. It honestly is my least favorite day of the year. I have a suspicion sleep means way too much to me. I won’t bother quoting the Proverbs about laziness. Because truly, when I’m awake I use my time fairly productively. I just like sleep!

The buzz of crickets hums a little louder every night. The bullfrogs are croaking. Spring sounds are my favorite. Though fall thrills me more than any other season, cold weather drives a silence ahead of it.

Birds make up the majority of the music I hear from my back porch. (Three mourning doves are eating birdseed just outside my window as I write.) However, one sound makes me smile more than any other – a yodel deep from my coonhound’s throat when she sees her first spring rabbit.

A coonhound on the scent in the woods will bark, bawl, chop bark and finally bay when it trees its prey. I know my coonhound’s got it in her, but I’m not in a hurry for her to discover all those voices, nor are my neighbors.

But the rabbits in our neighborhood have elaborate plans to draw her out. When we think they’re burrowed down in a hole somewhere away from the cold night air, they’re actually leaning over blueprints spread out on a stump in the woods.

Chloe has a round electronic parameter. She knows her limits and she doesn’t push them. The rabbits know them as well. They come as far as the edge and wiggle their eyebrows and ears at her. She’ll stand taunting from other dogs, golf carts and squirrels, but the rabbits test her dignity.

They generally hang out in the azaleas across the back of the yard. And that’s where she heads when I open the door. I love to watch her run after them. She comes close, until she has to skid into the bushes because she can’t go any farther.

Will she ever catch one? I suspect not. Only once did she get the opportunity. Before the electronic parameter, we would put her out on a lead. One time she broke out of her collar and took off after a rabbit. He ran; she chased, around and around a group of three neighboring houses, until Steve interfered with a golf cart. I’m absolutely certain that’s what she’s reliving when she’s napping and whimpering with all four legs running.

(If you’d like to read more, see “Life in the Wild” from July 2009.)

Bloom!

We are all straining forward – looking around the corner, checking the 10-day forecast on weather.com, opening the door at night to lean out and look at the stars. Spring…it’s so close and we’re so ready! We’ve begun hearing frogs and crickets across the lake and the birds know it’s the first day of spring.

Driving home from church today, I happened to glance at one of the many fields that we pass, as yet unplanted. And there in the middle of one brown, hay-strewn field were several bunches of daffodils, waving in the wind and cheering me.

The bumper stickers and little wooden plaques hang in Stuckeys and Cracker Barrel General Stores. “Grow where you are planted.” It occurs to me that many of us are planted right now in brown, hay-strewn fields. Or we have family or friends that live there.

To the person in the checkout line at Safeway or Walmart, we may be the only breath of spring, bunch of daffodils she will see today. We don’t have to be governed by our surroundings, circumstances or the people we meet. We have the freedom to reach out and take hold of the joy, love and peace that is available from the Holy Spirit. And to pass it on. Bloom where you are planted!

2 Corinthians 2:14-15
But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.

Just Waking Up

It all came together yesterday and I was breathing – alive – again. The day was warm; the sun was shining. In northern Virginia where I lived until last April, it would have been just a fluke – a strange, frustrating promise of warmer weather somewhere off on the snowy horizon. But here in South Carolina, it might possibly have just been the first day of spring! Not the official meteorologists’ date, but my own, everything-is-waking-up day.

Steve and I took the boat out for the first time since November and we cruised up and down the lake at a pace slow enough that the wind didn’t even blow my hair. The entire population of lake birds was up and out – screeching, squawking, and praising God in general.

I saw cormorants swimming along and diving under for fish and then the bump, bump, bump across the water as their tail feathers dip in a few times before they’re airborne. I watched gulls diving for fish and shivered at water that must still be under 55 degrees. I caught my breath and realized that I felt alive, really deep-breathing, life-appreciating alive for the first time in a while.

For an instant I understood those descriptions in books where people with an illness have been given a second chance at life; and they go running out of the doctor's office, seeing and hearing for the first time. And yet in the very next breath, I was down, emotion-wise, in the bottom of the boat. And I thought, is this what it takes? Do I have to be retired, with a boat and no responsibility (for today anyway), lovely weather and birds singing for all to be right with the world? For me to be truly, gut-level happy? Even that’s not it. For to me to be ALIVE, feeling every breath and appreciating it.

Of course the answer is no. There have been plenty of times in my life when it was good and I was grateful while still carrying a load of responsibility, stress and debt. I’ve heard it said that we don’t do nearly as much growing spiritually in the good, mountaintop times as we do during the times of need and complete dependence on God. And so there have also been times when I was on my knees in complete pain but also feeling utterly alive.

So why have I been numbed by life lately? Has my real self, the part of me that enjoys every day that God gives me on this earth, been drifting quietly like our boat tied up all those weeks? And the answer is, as always, my lack was my doing. After Christmas, I decided that God was telling me to back off responsibility a little and, in my usual self-indulgent way, I said, “Great! Put away your Bible and pull out the computer solitaire! Better yet, completely invest yourself in Facebook and cards with friends.”

All right. I exaggerate. But in truth I did quietly tiptoe away from my blessed time with God everyday. I said hello to Him occasionally and did enough Bible study so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed at my study group. But my daily time that He and I so look forward to, my time just getting into His Word and reading for the joy of it was lost.

And it’s funny. The first day or two felt strange, like something was missing. But it got easier and there was always something to pull at me, to claim my time. And the layers of film began to fall over my eyes and ears and around my heart. Finally about 3 days ago, I said, “Enough!” And I went back to my Father who had been waiting patiently. I talked to Him about it, about all of it.

So it wasn’t the sun or the warm weather. It wasn’t the lapping of waves against the side of the boat. The pure joy of being back in the hand of my God awakened my senses and quickened my breath. No, I never really left. I just forgot where I belonged.

Psalm 150:6
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.