I own an acre. Before I owned it, it was being used as a horse
pasture. There are vestiges of an old orchard here, so at one point in
the past, fruit trees provided sustenance for nearby residents. Before
that, as far as I know, it was wild land. This area has only been settled
for about 150 years. Before that, the occasional trapper wandered across here
and before that other hunters. But no one had every "lived"
here. There had never been a house here. We are the first people to sleep
here nearly every night for decades. When we first moved here, I tilled
up a 100 x 50 foot section for garden out back. It was tilled yearly for many
years, and then let rest. When we added Pablo, our mustang foal, 8 years
ago, That old garden section became extra pasture. After a while, it got
eaten down and overused and in the winter was mostly mud. One day,
though, when I was walking through, I looked down, and growing up through the
mud was a solitary crocus. I don't have any crocus planted in my beds,
and if my neighbors do, the nearest one s at least 100 yards away.
It was a
spot of joy in the midst of a field of overeaten, trampled grass, now mostly
mud.
In a way,
it's like our lives. We live in a broken world. We are broken
people. No matter how hard we try to be good, we still act and speak in
thoughtless, selfish ways. We hurt each other. We hurt the people we
love. The world hurts us. Even the people who are supposed to love
us sometimes hurt us. There is no place in our lives that isn't
"muddy". As we walk through this life, God doesn't promise us
that we will be spared the pain of this broken world. We will still live
with sickness, injury, pain--even sometimes caused by those who love us.
God doesn't promise that walking with Him will spare us all those things.
What He does promise us is His joy. We're still gonna have to slog
through the mud, but in the midst of it we may find a crocus.
