Springing Through the Path

I go out the door on a startlingly beautiful spring day for my morning walk down by the railroad tracks. It is especially beautiful since the week has been filled with hundreds of tornadoes roaring through the South at a breakneck speed. Arkansas lost fourteen people. I think about the devastated families as I walk gingerly down the steep hill to my usual walking path.

The air is permeated with the scent of late April honeysuckle. The sounds around me are the clumping of my tennis shoes, the NPR station playing over my earphones, and the birds twittering away. I see a robin on a fence rail, squirrels scampering on the path as if feeling their social time had been rudely interrupted by the presence of a human, and two white-tailed bunnies fleeing for safety. I feel the leaves and twigs from the recent storms crunching under my feet. Many flower gardens are in full bloom with the Iris colors of white, purple, and yellow. The sun shines with no impeding clouds for the day, and the temperature is fifty degrees. I believe this day might be the last perfect day for a while again since storms are forecast again for the weekend--perhaps the last until Oct. as I know a long, hot summer is literally just around the corner.

As I continue to grow older, I find as much delight in nature as Wordsworth did in the English countryside in the nineteenth century. In college I used to laugh to myself at the simple Romantic messages of his poems, the daffodils which he recounts while lying on his sofa recalling them, the "splendor in the grass" and "glory in the flower" as he recalls his days as a young man in school, and the simple nature walks with his sister. Now, some forty-five years later, I understand him. He was far deeper than I could have imagined.

The Weather and The Wedding

It seems that we have been inundated by two topics over the past couple of months--the numerous weather events across the South and the plans for the wedding between William and Catherine. The highs and lows have been reminding me of the precarious nature of life and love.

As a born and bred Southerner, the tornadoes in the spring are forever with us it seems. This year, however, has been record-setting with both the number of storms and the widespread death and destruction. Around 300 have died just this week. The storms seem to have no pattern in their attack and were capricious as they took an eight-month-old baby but left his parents unharmed. It has been rather disconcerting to see the media shift their emphasis often without a segue way between destruction and joy.

The good news is that the wedding in London has now gone off flawlessly, thanks t0 the very careful planning on how to manage millions of people in person. Even the rain predicted earlier in the week held off for the happy occasion. The new princess will, of course, walk somewhat in the shadow of William's mother, Diana, who this week has been variously described as "the people's princess" and a "nitwit hussy" (Ann Coulter).

The two themes of the spring just serve to remind us all to appreciate life and its joyful moments and hold them close to our heart. They unfortunately could all be blown away tomorrow.

The Unemployed Fishermen

I was watching the Sunday Morning program last week on CBS when I tuned in to a segment about the unemployment of middle-aged Americans and the difficulty of finding work again. At the end of the segment, one of the men being interviewed stated he would not give up--that it would be like going fishing and expecting to catch nothing. Since I had just been reading in my devotional book Our Daily Bread about Christ's disciples returning to their occupation of fishing after the crucifixion of Jesus, I started thinking about their three years of unemployment. After all, they gave up three years of their lives to follow the man Jesus. Now he was gone again, and life must return to normal. At this point of the gospel, the disciples realize they are catching absolutely no fish. A man on the shore instructs them to cast the net to the right side of the boat. They do so and find their nets so full of fish (one hundred and fifty-three) that they had trouble drawing them all in. Once ashore, they realize it is the resurrected Christ who had prepared a fire to cook the fish. The story reminds me again that often, as we experience hard times, we feel discouraged and that our lives will never be the same again. Yet, God in his grace restores us to Himself once again and fills our boats with abundance.

The Beauty of "Biutiful"

A friend and I recently saw the film Biutiful with Javier Bardem. I knew that it would be bleak because I had already heard Bardem played a character who was dying. What I did not expect, however, was to see such an ugly underbelly of a world set in Barcelona, Spain. The entire film was shot in the slums of the city where Chinese immigrants struggle to survive in a Western European country. Uxbel, Bardem's character, has two children, a wife who is bi-polar, and a shady lifestyle where he is a middle-man for illegal activities. Essenially, there is no hope in this life for any type of redemption. Uxbel, however, though complicated manages to display a good heart in not wanting to give up on his wife, desiring to make sure his children are taken care of after his death, and endeavoring to make the Chinese immigrants' life better. Unfortunately, he dies without accomplishing any of these goals. His only hope is found in the film's last scene where the audience realizes he is in eternity and has been reunited with the father he never knew. The film would seem to hearken back to the belief that life on this earth is evil and that one must simply endure until heaven is reached where all the injustices of life such as crime, poverty, illness, and so on will be made right. My theology of the past has also taught these lessons in a similar way. Even though I now attend a church which says that this life is the "kingdom of God," it is hard to look around and realistically see the beauty of most people. In my opinion, the beauty of Biutiful is that it does offer hope to be reunited with our loved ones in eternity.