Love Is Come Again

Now the green blade rises from the buried grain;
Wheat that in dark earth for many days has lain.
(John Crum, “Now the Green Blade Rises”)

They sit gazing at him up there. So proud of him. How can it be that in just four months he will be gone? These 18 years have gone by so fast. They sit here wondering who they will be when it is just the two of them again looking at each other across the kitchen table….

She is tacking the Time Magazine cover inside her locker – the picture of the polar bear on the melting ice pack and the headline, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” She is. While her friends worry about who is going to the spring prom she is worried about her future and the future of the world and she doesn’t want to forget what’s going on…

She stands looking at her body in the mirror. “YUCK! I HATE it!” Whose body is that anyway? I want my old body back!”…

They sit holding hands across the table, looking in each others eyes, now welling with tears. This time the treatment didn’t just work. The cancer is coming closer. They are worried, scared to death honestly, and want to be anyplace than here in this place…

Change is at the heart of human experience.

Change, at the heart of the Easter story.

We have heard it said that the work of grief clears the room for the newness of God to take root.

Heard it said that the gifts of confusion – and the anxiety, anger, fear that accompany it – loosen the soil so a new shoot, a new way, can break forth.

Sometimes, it seems like an idle tale. Change, full of the spin of pain that is getting us nowhere.

We don’t hear in the story how it happened that the women met the living Christ. We only are told that they did. That they met the living Christ in a way they never had met him before.

And while they can’t tell us exactly what happened, we can see it.

See it on the faces of the women and men who have followed them on the journey through grief and confusion and met a living God who has set them free in wonder, into the new that is God.

There is something – a force, a power, a presence, a name – call it what you will – that is life and love. We can’t force each other to get it, experience it, see it.

We can only witness to its presence – when we let it rise in our faces as it rose in the face of Jesus who let go of his life into the new that is God.

See it in the faces of the parents who let go of the child they used to know, the relationship they used to have together, and who are getting to know this new man their child has become and each other in this new season of their lives.

See it in the face of that passionate young woman, meeting head on the crises of our time – not with a with furrowed brow and anxious spirit, but with a heart broken open in love for God’s world.

See it here in the girl who sees a woman looking back at her in the mirror, smiling now, “You are beautiful.”

See it in the couple who look into each others eyes in love to embrace the life they have been given today.

Maybe, it’s not an idle tale.