How To Maintain In The Mundane

An old photograph and burgeoning tulips, two of the gifts I received this week. A picture it came, delivered by mail, a snapshot from the past, a comforting gift in the present. Housed in paper envelope, not digital and all the better, my fingertips stroked cherished memory, fanning into flame a burning desire to behold this loved one who passed many years ago. The photograph, her laughing smile and big wide glasses, hands wrapped around daughter of mine, these photos are few and she's been gone so long her voice a weak timbre in my ears.  I looked at the scene again from 1988. My mother, she's pressing my daughter close, this daughter who planted tulips around our Dogwood tree and our son stands smiling sweetly, cousins dressed smartly for the special occasion. Oh, how the past weaves itself into present, scrap booking memories together. A divine implant. And when life presses in hard, the next step seems ominous, maybe the best thing to do, is to "wait" for the unexpected. Take a step, wait, take another step. When trials in life threaten to unravel inner peace, old habits hang around like a bad boyfriend, and the Kardashian's appear in nightly dreams, the unexpected surprises in life glove the heart, warming it back up again. Supernatural CPR. My daughter asked me the other night if the tulips had shown their green tips yet. If they had surfaced through the wintry dirt and stretched their virgin stems. She ventured out into dark evening to investigate. Returning, she announced with great pleasure, an emphatic "Yes!" This was my second gift. The bulbs my daughter planted around base of Dogwood tree last year, a tender reminder of my own mother's bulbs I planted in same spot of earth those long years ago. They are springing to life, same as revived pumping of heart, past and present colliding together, wrapped as unforeseen gifts. F.B. Meyer said: "If God maintains sun and planets in bright and ordered beauty, He can keep us." I like that. In the "waiting" room, where nothing seems to happen, I scan the day with eyes searching for the presents, for ordinary to morph into extraordinary. Oswald Chambers says it well: "We will see God reaching out to us in every wind that blows, every sunrise and sunset, every cloud in the sky, every flower that blooms, and every leaf that fades, if we will only begin to use our starved imagination to visualize it." An old photograph, a maiden bed of tulips, light, light, light up my eyes to see ever more luminously, Him that maintains it all.