Hard Lines

 

Hard Lines

Nature appears as a world of transitions.  Nearly every observation seems to confirm that life is always a gradual unfolding.

The night-sky stars fade from the bottom edge of the eastern horizon even as all the rest of the sky is bejeweled with points of light.

Tiny wood violets push up through the layer of last fall’s molting leaves weeks before the buds of the mighty oak begin to swell.

Hummingbirds simply, quietly disappear from the backyard feeder, while the gabbling chorus of the marshland geese is still but a handful of disconnected notes.

The seed, planted in rich but still cool soil, continues to sleep for weeks before the tip of greenness finally emerges into June.

The lake surface is pressed by the lowering, lowering, steel-graying clouds of November each morning until that December morning when the brittle shell ice stubbornly refuses melt and seizes every ripple in the stillness of ice-over.

The moon builds full only to dissolve again with the constancy of waves that rhythmically lap the shore.

The rosebud, over days, swells and swells and slowly twists open, revealing first just a peak of color until the petals, like butterfly wings finally open full and test the warming breeze.

The morning dew frosts over crystalline day after day, the soil beneath feeling the settling in of winter’s deep, hard freeze.

The supple deep green leaves of the trees that so recently rustled in the warm, gentle breezes of August, now in late September begin to sleep more and more with each day, soon to reveal a palette of true color in October that will fade in brown, lifeless brittleness that will chatter, flee and fly with each harsh gust of November.

The russet and spotted fawn of May, now nearly as tall and tan and spotless as the doe, will turn again even a more somber gray for winter.

And yet, the other day I witnessed still another transition, this one was of only a few brief minutes.  Overhead, the hard edge of the thick clouds that had captured and held the sky for days suddenly appeared as distinct as a steep cliff shore plunging into an ocean of blue.  I watched with building hope as the sky flooded with clarity.

Creation, as its Creator, exists in eternal now.

We fool ourselves at times when we argue gradual shades of truth that we pretend define supposed multiple realities.  There is always an underlying hard line between real and imagined, between truth and untruth, between life and death.  Hard lines are not blurred.            

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Philippians 4:8

His Peace,

Deacon Dan