Today, I have been listening to God tell me about hope. It’s an important promise for me as we are finishing our adoption journey… beginning our parenting journey… and leaving so many children behind. I need these messages of hope, of life.
Eyes that don’t know trust yet.
The main story was this morning. Brian was working from home and we took a morning break to walk down the hill to bring the chickens a bag of food.
First promise of life… the rebirth of rain after a summer draught. The smell was fresh, the sun was cheerful, the air so deliciously clean. The birds chirping, the rough, scratchy grass softened. I had just scheduled Daniel’s first doctor appointment HERE in the States and I felt the life in me dancing.
While we were down in the coop, I decided to move our broody chicken (chicken that sits in her nest incubating eggs and who doesn’t leave the nest except for a bite of food or drink) out of her nest. She’s been sitting for well over the 3 weeks it takes to hatch eggs and I knew that the two eggs she was sitting on were most likely dead. I have a separate part of the coop with no nests that I was going to lock her in for a few days. It’s not my favorite thing to do. We’ve seen the eggs sitting cold (because she went back to the wrong nest on accident). One of the eggs had two long hairline cracks. They both had a slightly rotten smell. So we picked her up and turned to go.
A single fluffy yellow chick looked up at us with great surprise.
The other egg, still uncracked, peeped at us.
Life. Unexpected life. Life after adversity. Hope.
Hope for Daniel.
Then tonight after work but before dinner, we attacked the weeds in the garden. Our poor garden. We tended it some. We watered it some. And the weeds thrived and many of the cultivated plants died or sprawled on the ground for lack of necessary trellises. And the weeds. Oh, the weeds. We pulled and we pulled. With every giant weed we pulled from the rain-softened ground, we saw the soft, dark soil that we had prepared this spring. And I remembered that from our poor, overgrown, imperfect garden, that I’ve harvested tens of pounds of gorgeous, delicious tomatoes. And bags of carrots. And there are nearly a dozen small butternut squashes in there. And the blueberries… gallons of blueberries were picked this spring.
Hope. Promise. Life.
Finally, as I left the garden to feed my family, I saw a honeybee. It had been there an hour earlier. Sitting, moving slowly, lost little honeybee. It was a young one, not old and near death. But then, it was near death. I suppose it went too far from home without enough food. I mixed a teaspoonful of sugar water and offered it. She drank. Then she cleaned her antenna and wiped her face. I offered her the sugar again, but she flew away, in slowly widening circles, finding her way home.
Sometimes we need a helping hand.
Life.
Some days the death and suffering are all I can see. This world is so very broken. But other days the Lord whispers words of hope.
Garden in spring.