Analogies In Leaves

I spent many days of our warm fall, as a new resident of the mountains, out on our deck.  A dramatic winter then kept me inside, but with a view of the deck from my cozy spot in bed, looking out at the snow piling.  

The last couple weeks, it's begun to warm again (73 this morning by 7:30!) and so I get to enjoy the deck once again.  

It was a dramatic winter in more than just snowfall.  With the unexpected loss of two friends around my age within four months of each other, added onto four other losses in the last two years, my soul has been in a dark winter, darker than I have ever known.  It has been helpful in the last couple weeks to recognize it as a season.  Which means it will end, but which also means that it will endure for a time, and I feel that I need to embrace that time and what the particulars of the season will bring me.

A tulip bulb, for example--a counselor told me recently--is burrowed underground in winter.  It needs that time so it can flourish later.  It will be a flower one day, but today is not that day.  But without this time underground, it will never become the flower.

One new facet of home ownership that I am experiencing is the constancy of the scenery.  Although I only lived in two houses as a kid, it didn't occur to me then to observe my particular nature.  And as an adult, I have moved almost yearly since, often living in apartments with no nature to observe at all (and too busy in my youthfulness which demanded so much productivity that I hardly would have stopped to look anyway). This is a gift of age, and a gift of this location--to look, to notice, to observe.

We have these trees.  They are now "ours." And I see them every day and so I notice how they particularly change.

I have been watching the oak leaves change, day by day.  And I've written posts on social media in the past about how they've been this analogy.  These ones that turned brown & orange but never fell.  

12/15/2021:  I wake up every morning and check if they're still there.  I gotta hand it to these hangers-on.  It's halfway through December and they've endured the color change, but they've refused as of yet to let got.  There's some kind of half-formed analogy there I'm still working out, some kind of exhortation.  Hebrews 10:23 comes to mind. "Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm..."

It's a weak, fleeting analogy: their connection is tenuous and their falling inevitable.  But it still makes me reflect on things like pressing on despite the odds and despite the mockery, criticism, and cynicism.

"...for God can be trusted to keep his promise." In concert with the fields, floods, rocks, hills, and plains, I repeat this sounding joy.  This, the song song I employ.  "(For)...we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved." 

 

01/21/2021:  A winter storm three weeks ago and these brave leaves remain.  I've been wondering the last three weeks if they outlasted me.  I spend too much time and energy thinking about the reactions of those clinging to the coattails of my faith and those vultures circling, hoping to pounce on its carcass.  So I am focusing instead now on just navigating through this unchartered territory, keeping the few safe people on speed dial, and going as slowly as I please and saying all the honest things I want...being who I am and not what people want me to be.   

Over the last few weeks, we've watched as the non-existent leaves became buds which became small leaves which are now full-fledged oak leaves.  They've filled in the space once again, creating this gorgeous green canopy over the backyard.  And yet, there are still, to my amazement and amusement, some of those old orange leaves hanging on.

Can you see them in there?  Funny things.  I've been busily raking up the rest of their brethren, which did what they were "supposed to," but these ones remain.  They hang on, preaching to my soul.

My faith is intact, but it's intact in a fiesty, intellectual way.  That is, my brain is committed to this. This is different than the way I have always lived it, feeling it deeply, a great love story.  It is uncomfortable and it fits like new garment I'm not entirely convinced I want to keep yet.  It feels disconnected from my emotions (well, except for anger) and my heart.  I'm hoping that it's a seasonal, temporary faith-phase.  But it is what it is, and I'm refusing to be a flower just because I have always been a flower and people need and expect me to be a flower.

Another analogy in the leaves, as I see all these fresh green ones shimmering in the sun next to these dried up, limp ones--oh, it makes me laugh (if not only to stop from being swallowed whole by my cynicism).  It's like me hanging in there among all these earnest, unscathed, dearly precious Christian young women I know--so excited for what is to come in both life and ministry.  I don't want to squelch them; I truly never want to be that person.  But I still in my heart wish there was some way to warn them about what is to come.

Would earnest, unscathed, precious 20-year-old Amy have listened, though? Probably not.  The story must unfold; no one can unfurl it for us.  So I hang in there, withered as I am, and pray that maybe I can advise down the road, when the ugly surprises come and they begin to wonder how they can possibly hang on.