A quote by C.S. Lewis I recently read in a biography by Beatrice Gormley read (from memory)"I find at 50 that much of me is still that 12 year old boy and I suspect that at 12 I already had much of the 50 year old in me".
As I passed a newly mown alfalfa (hay) field and smelled the richness of the sweet hay raked in rows awaiting transportation to feed bunks or plastic ag-baggers I imagined the life-cycle of the farmer's alfalfa. What is now sweet-smelling will become waste and smell enough to make me wretch in disgust before a year is out. The process of being alfalfa is like that. Oh if that alfalfa could remain on the cusp of pre-flower fullness instead of being subject to the haymakers knife, the cows bicuspids, .... Anyway, as I thought about both the alfalfa and Lewis (he had a very tough childhood of abuse and neglect after his mother died when he was 9) I thought about people and how we can look deeply at people and find a mirror of most of what we are in almost anyone we meet. Our alfalfa has manure in it as well as our manure has alfalfa in it and the same it is with everyone else. If we can love people for their alfalfa and have mercy on their manure maybe our own alfalfa will be freed to remain at its fullness in wonder and admiration of the life we've so graciously been given in Christ.
2 comments:
Beautiful.
I'm listening to John Eldredge's newest message, "The Utter Relief of Holiness" right now, and this seems to be swimming in that same pond. There is something essential in every one of us, something that belongs to redeemed humanity, something that belongs to Christ. Seems like Christ's awareness of that allowed him to deal patiently with all the alfalfa in the manure, and all the manure in the alfalfa. Maybe I could live that way, too.
I hope I can. In the next moment I'm alive, and then the next...
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