What We Learned this Spring (2021)

“Holiness is sustained attention to the heart.” Richard Foster

The patio umbrellas are out. I’m making iced tea. but before we plunge into summertime, let glance back at spring.

Here are 5 things I learned this spring. They range from deep to lighthearted and everything in-between. I hope you find one you can use in your life.

1.    God leads an interesting life.

I wonder sometimes what I truly know of the God I love and in whose image I am made. I am not talking about what I know about him in my head. I am talking about what I am experiencing of him while in his presence, heart and soul.

Resurrection Sunday started me pondering. Feeling the shaking of that rock rolling away from the empty tomb had me asking how much I actually know him and his love for me.

Does he have dirt under his fingernails, a smudge on his sweaty brow, or leaves in his hair? What does his voice sound like? What makes him smile or laugh or cry? What are my nicknames for him? What do his footsteps sound like? Is footsteps even the word that describes his presence? Maybe it is fingerprints or breath or twinkling smile or belly laughter.

"It is a great and important task to come to terms with what we really think when we think of God. . .
We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly, he is the most joyous being in the universe. . .  All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth of richness." 

Dallas Willard  The Divine Conspiracy 

What is the life and love of the One who created red-winged blackbirds, dogwood trees, seahorses, fresh figs, porcupines, pine cones, giraffes, and butterflies?

What about the hand that crafted spider silk and the patterns of their webs lined with dew?

What about the care given to the backs and undersides of things?

What about the delicacy and playfulness of freckles, farts, eyelashes, and cuticle moons?

What about the kind of listener He is to us who long to be heard?

Talk about an interesting life. Above all the beauty I listed above, I think the most interesting thing about God’s life are his relationships – within the Trinity, with his creation, with us within his creation. It makes me say with J.B Phillips, my God is too small!

I wonder how you experience God’s interesting life?

2.    It was time to fire my bodyguard.

I first heard Anne Lamott mention firing her bodyguard in an interview with Kate Bowler on her podcast Everything Happens. It resonated immediately and lingered afterwards, a sure sign of an invitation to explore.

I’m not sure it was a muscled man or even a bar bouncer, though that is funny to picture walking ahead of me. I like to think what I had around me was more of a defined boundary than a “Keep Out” sign on a high wall. Whatever it was, I started noticing it was getting in my way, keeping me from other people and keeping them from getting too close to me, and God too.

It begs the question, what did I need protection from? The usual suspects: heartbreak, disappointment, abandonment, failure, embarrassment, sorrow, betrayal. I remember growing up being the new kid more times than I care to count. I became good at making friends but also at saying goodbye. Which meant becoming guarded because I knew just about the time I let my guard down, we would move again.

There were real reasons for hiring that body guard in the first place.  But that was then.

Now, I know my deep desires for love, joy, belonging, connection, and trust remain whether I am open or closed. The truth is a bodyguard will keep those beauties out too. He doesn’t know the difference.

I want to meet you and have you meet me without going through my bodyguard. I want to know and be deeply known by my good and beautiful God, face-to-freckled face. So I’m giving my bodyguard a pink slip.

Hello there, it’s delightful to meet you. 

3.    We walk in God’s enchanted world.

Since firing my bodyguard, a wider world has split wide open, both inside and out. I have had several vivid encounters with God in his enchanted world, which I often need to remind myself I both live within and lives within me.

Recently, I stood under the footbridge with a driftwood swing. A child played on the Deschutes River bank. I paused to take in the scene and noticed butterflies gathering by the water’s edge. Suddenly, I was awash in a kaleidoscope of California Tortoiseshell butterflies, fluttering, landing at my feet and on my jacket. In that moment, the world seemed to pause and shimmer with a different kind of light like golden hour only at eight o’clock in the morning. The child’s voice was simultaneously clear and dreamy. I felt God’s wing. 

When my bodyguard was around, I might have missed it or kept it to myself – protection from you thinking I was crazy. But God’s nearness is so tender, vibrant, strengthening. And one of the lessons from this pandemic, not only for me. We all walk through God’s enchanted world and need the reminder. It thrums with his presence.

It’s just that we forget. God is re-making us. As my spiritual director said recently, God is re-enchanting us. At first I wasn’t sure about the “re” part, but the longer I have thought on living a resurrection life right here and now, the more true that becomes.  We lost the garden and need to be re-gardened. Garden. Exile. Re-Garden.

We lost the enchantment and need to be re-enchanted. Enchantment. Sleep. Re-Enchantment.

I think it was Kate Bowler who said,  “We are group projects, being remade by God and each other . . . we are not self-making people.”

That rings true to me. This is what I’m learning.

4.    Sabbath is an of inkling or resurrection.

I don’t pretend to have delightful trust all figured out. (Note the recent firing of my bodyguard.)

Still, I have been exploring Sabbath as something we rest in and live happily out of, a sort of hint of resurrection.

There’s something in Sabbath of God’s deep happiness bubbling up and out over the whole universe that streamed from his wildly creative heart. Its humbling to thing at his happy rest had nothing to do with being worn out, overworked, or frazzled.

I think it was about delight. 

I was particularly struck by these words from Abraham Joshua Heschel where Sabbath and resurrection meet, 

“And the world becomes a place of rest . . .

People assemble to welcome the wonders of the seventh day,

while Sabbath sends out its presence

over the fields,

into our homes,

into our heats.

It is a moment of resurrection

of the dormant spirit

in our souls.”

Sabbath keeping is first a series of small deaths, the deaths of how big work can become, of how independent I imagine I am, how much I think I am the one keeping my little  world spinning, my tendency to live in any time or economy other than God’s. But if we can surrender to them, on the heels of those deaths, we wake up and come alive. There follows a series of openings to of a whole new kind of life nesting in God’s tender care.

Every seventh day is an invitation to a soul’s pace, an opening to slower living, creativity, restorative rest, worship, imagination, feasting, and all around holy loitering. I have been baking bread and making room to paint with watercolors on my Sabbath day.

I wonder what small ways are you sensing in Sabbath an inkling of resurrection?

5.    A group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope.

Back to God leading an interesting life. I was thrilled to discover one word for a group of butterflies is kaleidoscope which is fun to say and lovely to imagine.

Of course, I kept going and found these names for animal gatherings:

• moths are an eclipse

• otters are a raft

• elephants are a memory

• hyenas are a cackle

• monkeys are a barrel

• zebras are a dazzle

• unicorns are a marvel

• vipers are a generation

You may have used “barrel of monkeys” and that last one about vipers being a generation is straight out of the book of Matthew.

And I cannot wait to tell my granddaughter, Sweet Pea, about zebras being a dazzle and unicorns being a marvel. Those are her favorites.

Those are the spring lessons that stood out to me. Also of note, my irises bloomed again after a year or two suddenly dormant, and without me dividing them. That surprise is making me ask a question I heard somewhere and leave you with as we plunge into summertime,

How far does your hope go?

* * *

 If you’re interested in joining this rhythm of noticing what you’re learning, there’s room for you. It is better in community which is how I began with Emily P. Freeman back when we were writing these list posts monthly. When we shifted to quarterly, I kept her dates of sharing as they work around life and holidays: end of May, end of August, end of Nov, and end of Feb.

If you’re wondering how to start, there is no right or wrong way. It very organic, but it does help to keep a list as you go. Here is how I do it.

I tab a page in my journal with washi tape and keep a running list of things I am learning each season (spring, summer, autumn and winter). Then at the end of those 90 days, I choose the ones that seem to have hung around.

Your lessons don’t have to be big or deep. I am often surprised by the smallest ones: a word, the name of a flower, something I overheard, something funny or mistaken. I also look back through the photos on my phone and see what I have been noticing in real time. Sometimes my lessons begin with a photo. Other times, the scene catches my eye because of what I’m learning.

So meet me back here in three months time when I will share “What I Learned this Summer”.