If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to night,” Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike. (Psalm 139)
After church a few Sundays back, one of our church kiddos, Hans, asked me to go down to the Peace Garden to show him the tiny caterpillar I had seen there the other day. When we got there, we saw one, then another, and another, and another…I think Hans counted thirty by the time we were through. It was lovely to see that garden we planted during the pandemic so full of the promise of butterflies.
Then I walked by a few days later and only saw four. It may be that some of the thirty were cocooned. Some might have been hiding or less visible to my eyes than to a seven-year-old’s. Others might have been taken by birds or the fierce rain two nights ago. Looking at the two fat caterpillars busily munching on a leaf in front of me, I wasn’t sure what to feel about it all.
And that’s all small stuff compared to what we’ve been facing this past week with fires raging in the BWCA. Some of us have been evacuated; others are waiting in the Ready Zones. Some of us have family members actively in the field, managing and fighting the fires. All of us are affected by the dangerous levels of smoke in the air and the anxiety that comes from too much time spent indoors, windows tightly closed, checking the Watch Duty app.
In church we’ve just finished reading through the Messianic section of Matthew, after the Beatitudes, where Jesus calls his disciples and sends them out to heal, cast out demons, and share his message. Then he offers insight and advice about their work and the people they meet. Some of these passages were a real struggle for us to work through on Sunday mornings; Jesus has harsh words for those who met the disciples’ work with skepticism and false accusations. The world, in many of these readings as in our own lives, is too often a dark place, with as much harm acting in there as good.
Sometimes, in the words of this week’s psalm, it feels like surely, the darkness will cover us. Monarch caterpillars get taken down by storms and predators, unaware of the transformation and new life so close at hand. I sat on the couch in pieces one smoky morning this week, weeping to Will (shout out to husbands who know when to just listen) because summer—the months that make it worth living here!—will be over before the fires end.
Negativity bias, which Will brought up during sermon discussion a few weeks back, is real (though he had the grace to not bring it up again to my sobbing self). There’s real danger in the way that negativity keeps us focusing too much on all the bad stuff that might happen. On birds that gobble up the seeds in last week’s Parable of the Sower and the little stripey green creatures we created a home for in our pollinator garden. on fires that threaten the forest and homes we love.
But Jesus doesn’t get stuck on the bad stuff that’s happening to him and his friends, and I don’t think we’re meant to stay there in that dark place either. “Are you having a real struggle?” he asks. “Come to me! Are you carrying a big load on your back? Come to me—I’ll give you a rest!”
Jesus reminds his disciples that they won’t get anywhere if they focus solely on the hard places or on their failures. It doesn’t matter if they reap 30 or 100 times the seed they sowed. Jesus just asks that they and we keep our hearts, feet, and hopes firmly anchored in God’s kingdom, and the healing and belonging it offers.
That morning in the pollinator garden, I found a few pods of milkweed seeds left from last year’s plant, and Hans stuffed them in his pocket to take home for the new pollinator garden his parents are building in their backyard. When he lets go of the seed, there’s no way it’s all going to stay on that good earth they’ve prepared for it, any more than the milkweed stayed within the walls of our church garden. Nor is it possible to keep all the caterpillars safe from the birds looking for food for themselves and their babies. But we can see beyond the borders and broaden our gardens to encompass the places the seed lands. We can rejoice every time we notice even one small caterpillar making its way along a leaf.
Will roused me from my grey outlook by handing me an N95 and driving us out to our farm garden, right on the edge of the fire’s Ready Set Go zones. We hoed and weeded, saving the purslane that was growing up alongside the squash and beans and stopped to pick a bucket of Juneberries on our way home. I made a salad with both for lunch.
We can’t stop the weeds, the predators, or the fires from coming. But they won’t overwhelm us, and they won’t keep out the love, the healing, and the joy that is God’s kingdom, as long as we have eyes to see it and hands willing to do each small thing that shows the world where our hearts belong.
Sunday Morning Words 