Midsummer past

Just like that, we are at the final day of June. 

Last night the moon was full.  It surprised me.  I took Schubert out before bed, and I thought I saw the moon behind the trees that grow in front of the lake.  We walked around the cul-de-sac to get a view, and sure enough, hanging low in the sky, a perfect golden circle of light.  To be accurate, it was truly full two days earlier, on Wednesday, our 31st anniversary.  But I did not see it that night.

Today the temperature went up to nearly 100, or maybe even higher.  I did a minuscule amount of yard work, and came inside drenched with sweat.  It's been a quiet day. 

Quietly, June passes into July.  Almost imperceptibly, the days begin to shorten again, and we almost don't mind, because of the heat.

Here are a few last photos from June.

Water droplets on lady's mantle always amaze me.  It was even more enchanting when it cupped only the distilled drops of dew from overnight, but I forgot and turned on the sprinkler before I remembered to take a picture.  Don't you think it's still beautiful, though?  Water droplets on leaves give such a picture of life.

This is a tiny rose--the photo is larger than life-size--and it's from the very beginning of June.  I sorely need to deadhead that rosebush now.  Maybe this evening, when it isn't quite so hot.  Often when I deadhead faithfully, I can keep these blooms coming for quite awhile.

Didn't I tell you a few days ago, that I had better hydrangeas than the picture I put up earlier?  My hydrangeas are incredibly high maintenance.  Planted in almost complete shade, they still throw a tantrum every day between noon and 2, when the sun gets on them.  In the later afternoon, they happy up for me, though.  I read somewhere that their name starts with "hydra" because they need a ton of water.

Here's dorky-looking bloom from another hydrangea plant, one of my most hysterically sun-hating bushes.  Keeping it real, here...

During my short time outside today, I found this broken robin's egg shell on the ground.  I hope there is a healthy, happy baby robin somewhere out there.  Why do you think robin's eggs are blue?  It doesn't make any sense to me.

Birds and words

This is a gentle mother dove who took up residence 

in a hanging basket outside our front door, 

in the summer of 2012.

Hope is on my mind these days.  Honestly, sometimes it's very hard to hold onto hope.

When you've been praying about something for over three years, maybe over four years, and things are worse instead of better, it's hard to hope.

And then somebody laughs at you and says, "Ha!  Three years is nothing.  I know people who have prayed about issues like this for over fifteen years.  You might even die, before this prayer is answered."

Which is true, of course.  It is not for me to demand a timeframe from God.  I must patiently endure this world and place my hope in His promises, His goodness, His love and mercy.  I must accept whatever He gives me, and trust that it is somehow for the best, because He is perfect and wise.  True things are not necessarily comfortable, and God is not primarily concerned with our comfort, although He is the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort others in their affliction (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

May your unfailing love surround us, O Lord, for our hope is in you alone.

~Psalm 33:22

Ah yes.  Hope.

I looked up the Greek word for hope, and it is spero.  This put me in mind of the word sparrow, and I wondered how many birds are associated with love-joy-hope words.

[Is there a word for love-joy-hope words?  Are they virtues?]

Anyway, here's what I get:

Love:  The term "love birds" is fairly common, along with cute cartoons depicting two little birds posing together in sweet harmony.  There is an actual bird called the lovebird.  It's a genus of African parrot, and its scientific name is agapornos which comes from the Greek agape (love) and ornos (bird).

Joy:  This is totally out-on-a-limb from my own head, but I associate canaries with joy.  Brilliant yellow birds, they sing joyous songs.

Peace:  Doves have been a symbol of peace for as long as anyone can remember.

Hope:  As I already pointed out, Greek for hope is spero, so I think of the sparrow.

Faith:  I was surprised to learn that the phoenix has long been a Christian symbol of faith and constancy.  I usually associate the phoenix with the idea of resurrection, the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes.  How encouraging it is to couple the two ideas.  My faith, though tested severely, will come through each fiery trial, renewed like the phoenix, even stronger than before.

June garden

The nasturtiums leading up to the front door aren't out of control yet, nor have the zinnias begun blooming.  The sweet potato vine is growing three times faster than anything else, and not much is in balance.

More insight on that sweet potato vine.  The impatiens are trying.  I don't mind.  There's just something about planting the pots myself, even if they're wonky in the end.

Nasturtium faces.  They are so sweet.

And even closer up... sweetly pensive, here.

The wind blows always, and I had quite the time 

trying to focus these tiny, waving lavender buds.

For a junky, tough, throw-in-wherever plant, 

the daylilies have been delightful this year.

Clematis blossoms after their peak, after a storm.  Raindrops on flowers past their prime 

are kind of like bright lipstick on old ladies.  Endearing.

Just to show that even in deep shade, 

a daylily will sometimes do something for you.

Feathery pink astilbe in its fullest glory.

This is a fantastic plant.

A hydrangea, trying.  I have some better ones going, but 

I didn't feel like going out to snap them today.  Still, I was never able 

to coax blooms out of the hydrangeas I planted in New York.

I just love coreopsis.  It's the stuff of fairy gardens, not that 

I believe in fairies, but the storytellingness of it seems magical.

Cleome.

more cleome

Obedient plant in dazzling array.

Tough little beautiful malva zebrina.

And a tiny zinnia

growing random in the center island bed,

pale pink,

partnered with a particularly petite

buzzing bee.

Illuminating light

This is a weird picture.  It does not capture my bedroom accurately.  For one thing, I'm usually pretty meticulous about making my bed.  (I took the picture before I made my bed this morning, to illustrate a point about how sunshine falls on the linens.)  For another thing, the room is a lot more symmetrical than the photo makes it appear; the dimensions in this shot are oddly warped.  My bed, for example, is level in real life, and the light fixture is smack in the center of the room.  The way this cellphone camera foreshortens things is astounding. (I especially recoil at what it does to the nose on my face.)

However, this picture does capture the bright morning light.

Seriously.  I love midsummer.  I am not going to nay-say the week of summer solstice.  I live all year in anticipation of the longest day (or, in this case maybe the second-or-third-to-longest day, since there was a monsoon on the longest day).  The longest days of summer are my favorite, the absolute triumph of life, and a glorious foretaste of our eternal life to come.

But.

Yes, but.  Early mornings are brutal these days, as the fierce sun rises and explodes in through my bedroom window onto my bed at something like 5:15am.

I've not been sleeping particularly well as of late, so often when I awaken for the second or third time, around 3:30 or 4:00am, realizing that there is only about an hour of darkness left for sleeping, I relocate to my study on the northwest corner of the house.  There, I can nest on my cozy futon, which comes accessorized with a small, cuddly, brown dog, and I can sleep until 7:30 with no sunshine blasting through my eyelids.

See the flopped-out doggy on the left?  He likes to nestle in the crook of my knees, which is fine until I want to turn over, but still.

Lesson of the Day:  Find a dimmer place to sleep, when you need to.  It's okay.

Another Lesson:

When you are seeking to become a better listener, ask the Lord to grant you the humility to be compassionate to the person speaking.  Listen "between the lines."

It is a prideful thing to claim, "You said X, and that means X," and then interrupt someone's attempts to clarify, insisting, "No. You said X."

It is actually cruel to accuse someone of lying when the person is trying to clarify what was meant by what may have been unintentionally clumsy words.  We all choose the wrong words sometimes.  Be kind in the way you would hope others would be kind to you.  Give people a chance.  That's grace.

A listener is not a good listener if the listener listens with a goal to trap and judge rather than to understand and build bridges.

It is a sign of humility and compassion to ask for clarification, or at least to accept clarification when someone tries to give it.   Conversations are not about besting, "winning," attacking unfortunate word choices and triumphantly declaring someone else to be in the wrong, despite protests or even apologies.  This style of communication bears bitter fruit.

We all long to be heard and understood.  Yes, there are manipulators.  God will deal with them.  We need to approach one another with humility, compassion and a desire to understand.

Do you know, you find the best in people far more often if you look for it.  Look for the best, and listen between the lines.  Grace yields sweet fruit.

venting (sorry... that's your invitation to skip this one)

This is coreopsis.  

My heart has always warmed to coreopsis, the delicate, fairy-like foliage framing clouds of tiny, daisy shaped flowers.

Our neighborhood has boulevards, and at the tip of the boulevard just past our house, someone had put in a little garden of perennials: sedum, ornamental grasses, and a border of coreopsis.

This spring, the employees of the company that mows the common ares in our neighborhood took a weed-whacker to the coreopsis and mowed it to the ground.  I was stunned and appalled.

I knelt beside the little bed and tried to see if there were any remnants of coreopsis that I could encourage to grow back.  I carefully weeded out the crabgrass that sprang up in newfound freedom from other vegetation.  I carried numerous sprinkling cans of water over and gave drink to the soil.

Small patches of coreopsis started to come back, feebly.  I continued weeding and watering.  Shawn inserted a row of small orange flags around the area.  Some bare spots persisted, so we dug up a few purple coneflowers and black-eyed-susans from our own yard and transplanted them to fill the empty spaces, increasing our trips with the watering can to help them get established.  This is a challenge for me, with my lupus.  I really feel those walks with the watering can.  But it was a labor of love.

A period of heavy rains followed, and I saw with satisfaction that our transplants had settled in and were growing.

Yesterday, I walked over to check my babies, and to my horror, I saw that the mowing crew had been through again and mowed down everything in the bed, even knocking one of Shawn's orange flags into the road where it lay forlorn and humiliated.  What had been a small but flourishing black-eyed-susan was now a trio of dry, bare stems jutting three inches from the ground.  I felt like I'd been socked in the stomach.  Tears stung the backs of my eyes.  And then my arms began to tremble with rage.  How can people who purport to be landscapers be so incredibly stupid and destructive?

This is my take-away:  If I can love my little struggling perennials and feel such protective fury over their destruction, how much more does God love His children, and direct wrath against the forces of evil that deceive them and separate them from Him?

God loves us dearly.  He created the entire, vast universe to hold us, and He designed a planet perfectly suited to provide air that we could breathe, water to hydrate our cells, an eco-system with rain and sun, plants and animals, food and light and beauty.  God breathed into us the breath of His own life, to give us life.  He tenderly cares for us, and when sin became a problem for us, He sent His precious, only begotten Son to die--to literally bleed out--to make a way to redeem us.  God has invested all this in His children, His treasured creations.

God loves us, and someday, He is going to take our enemy, the devil, down.

But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, 

it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck 

and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

~Matthew 18:6

Do you not know that you are God's temple 

and that God's Spirit dwells in you?  

If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him.  

For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple.

~1 Corinthians 3:16-17

And the devil who had deceived them

was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur

where the beast and false prophet were,

and they will be tormented day and night

forever and ever.

~Revelation 20:10

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.  

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

~Romans 16:20

Happy June

I just adore summer.  This is the very best point of the year, leading up to the summer solstice.  Each day is a little longer than the last.  Flowers bloom.  We can go for walks in the park in the evening after supper.  My feet are rarely cold.

I like this picture.  Those are strawberries from my back terraces, grown in the shade.  Perhaps the lack of sunshine is what makes them so sour.  Honestly, for how active our sassy chipmunk is, I didn't think we'd have half a shot at any strawberries, but I've harvested a few, and they seem to be untouched.  These, I grabbed while puttering, and I set them here, on the arm of the chair on the front porch, to keep them clean while I continued to weed and water.

We planted sweet potato vine in our pots this year, and its growth is vastly outpacing everything else.  You can't tell because of the nice blurring of the background in this picture, but the pots are wonky.  It's okay.  That's the way I like my garden: lots of growth, lots of color, and not too much plan.  I will never win an award, but I am happy with what results from my efforts.  Maybe that's how I write, too.

Sometimes a person writes something and wishes she hadn't.  I do.  But even more often, I say things and wish I hadn't.  I'm not sure whether it happens to other people, but there are times when I start to remember all the cringe-worthy moments of my life, stupid things I've said, or unkind, or embarrassing, all the awful moments that I wish I could undo, but I can't.  When those kinds of thoughts well up--bad memories, regrets, sorrows--it can be paralyzing.  One is tempted to feel defined by one's mistakes.

That, of course, is exactly what Satan wants us to feel:  lousy, hopeless and defined by our mistakes.

But God gives us grace, and grace is forgiveness, coupled with the power of the Holy Spirit to renovate our hearts and make us "new creatures," beautiful creatures defined by the redemption of Christ.

This morning, I was feeling rotten about so, so many things.  I took it to Jesus and told Him what I was thinking and feeling.  He lovingly reminded me that He gives more grace, that His power is made perfect in weakness, that when I humbly bow before Him and confess my need, He will lift me up and fill me with His bountiful Holy Spirit.

Jesus loves me.  He demonstrated His love for us in that while we were still messed up, blind to glory and shackled by the chains of sin, He died for us, to free us.  Jesus didn't come to condemn--we were already condemned.  Jesus came to save us from already existing condemnation.  God so loved the world.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sin.
(See Romans 5:8, John 3:16-17, 1 John 4:10.)

Jesus loves me and treats me with grace, even though I am a mess.  He reminded me that His forgiveness removes my sins as far as the east is from the west.  I do not need to walk in shame, because Jesus loves me and lavishes grace on me.  It doesn't matter whether I was horrendously wicked or stupendously tasteless.  Jesus loves me, forgives me, accepts me, and invites me to get up and try again, this time depending on Him, on His Holy Spirit alive and living in my soul.

"My grace is sufficient for you," He tells me (1 Corinthians 12:9).  I can walk in victory because of Jesus.  "Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame," (Psalm 34:5).

I prayed that Jesus would take the devil's wiles and turn them against him, and Jesus reminded me that the more I cringe over my mistakes, the more thankful I become for His salvation.  When Satan piles on the guilt and shame, I can pile on the praise for all that Jesus has done for me, releasing me from the clutches of sinful desire and inviting me to be the recipient of His great and precious promises and a partaker of His Divine Nature!  I grow in humility and gratitude and joy.  My God can do this miracle, too, this miracle in my heart.

The One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.

           ~1 John 4:4

Amen.