You Are a Perennial

 

Last week I posted, in distress, “consider the lilies of the fields."

And I did just that.

I walked to my front yard and looked at the lily in my front flower bed. No more blooms. A brown branch remained.

Dead.

I shared this over dinner, with a layer of cynicism. Amber responded, with classic eyes rolled, "it's not dead. It's just changing. New growth returns in the spring."

Mind. Blown.

I think there is a reason the imagery of the Sage was lilies in the field not sunflowers.

And I love sunflowers.

Still, sunflowers are annuals. They die. Lilies are perennials. They have bulbs. They return to a fresh form of beauty each year. They cycle through their growth.

My friends, in this fall season, may you see yourself and how you lead not as dead and dying, but changing. Look for the signs of growth that will give way to a new emergence of goodness and beauty.

You are a perennial.

The Sit before the Change

Only when we sit in the shadow, dwell in and contemplate the shade alongside and with others in similar contexts with parallel stories holding space together willing to name our great fears, losses, and laments, cycled for generations, can we begin to see a new emergence an open invitation to change, a call that comes only after the sit

--

For a variety of reasons, I write about Scripture less and less these days. But somehow, Sunday's lectionary found its way into my morning meditations, pulling the chair out from my normal reading of poetry and a good novel. 

What felt like an abrasive disruption became a nudge to my own stanza above, shaped by this lection: 

"The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat together in the region and sat together in the shadow of death [Ps. 23], light has dawned. From that time, only after sitting with them, Jesus began to proclaim, 'Now is the invitation to Change.'"

--Matthew 4:16-17 (my own paraphrase]