Have You Seen The Snow This Summer?
If you haven’t, step outside and look again. There’s a magical event taking place, as rare as snow and just as white. All across England the Clematis vitalba, fondly know to us Brits as ‘Old Mans Beard’ is releasing its seeds into the breeze. It is as if a billion dandelion clocks have exploded in one go, filling the summer air with great gusts of white confetti.
Have you seen it? It’s a party that we are all invited to. It’s wonderful! Piling up in the gutters, floating in the puddles, these delicate treasures carry within their fluffy structures a toolbox with everything needed inside to grow hundreds of towering trees! The more I think about it, the more extravagant it seems! There are countless numbers of these seeds, all over the place, everywhere. There is so much potential hanging in the air right now and there is no way we can comprehend the world changing implications of even one cluster of the ‘old man’s beard’.
Maybe like me you are in a season of transition, floating on the breeze, preparing to land somewhere, maybe soon. You are feeling delicate, a little bit fluffy. Swept up by strong currents into the arena of the big blue sky, the nuggets that you collected, ready in your toolbox, seem to shrink into specks. You feel inadequate, ill-equipped, tiny.
Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
James 4 v 14
I felt this way until I was reminded of something that I all too often forget.
Everything we have got
Has been given.
Our seeds, our tools, our treasures,
The very breath in our lungs has been given.
We didn’t call ourselves into existence.
The One whom formed us;
Our spirits, our souls and our bodies,
Whom planned all the days of our lives
Before the world was formed,
The gift giver to whom we can entrust every gift,
Whose breeze will carry us to where we belong,
Whose name will do great and glorious things, in us and through us,
Did.
It is a finished plan that is already in motion, which nothing can trip up or stop.
Since you have purified your souls by obedience to the truth so that you have a genuine love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from a pure heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For,
“All flesh is like grass,
and all its glory like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of the Lord stands forever.”
1 Peter 1 v 22-24
(Also Romans 8:31-39)
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