“I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.”
Psalm 77:11
One of
these days, I’ll glance out the window into our backyard and see our first
robin perched on the stones of the retaining wall or sitting, tail flicking, on wooden side of a garden box.
Seriously,
it won’t be long and I’ll hear his or her unmistakable medley through the early morning darkness.
Yesterday,
my wife says she and our daughter, on a trip to Omaha, were accompanied, up and
back, by soaring echelons of geese as all of them followed the path of the Missouri River. I saw a flocks of them myself around a big bend of the Big Sioux just outside of
Flandreau, South Dakota. In the next month there will be more. If I’m lucky I’ll
be out myself with the camera on one of their busy travel days.
Won’t be
long and the ornamental grasses all around the yard will have to be hacked down
to make way for whole colonies of little green shoots that were probably waiting to poke their heads up and out of the cold earth--yesterday probably a bit impatiently. I’ll scratch away the detritus from the perennial bed, and
find a spray of tiny green nubbins steering their up toward the light.
It’s
still mid-February, and the first act of spring’s great drama would be premature
if it were to be staged right now. This morning there’s no robin in the skeletal tree
outside the window, but his—and her—time will come.
Easter is a ways off, spring solstice still a vision; it’s winter, not spring, even
though the rivers are up with all that melting snow. Yesterday, late, I was
just getting home when I missed the most beautiful shot of the day, when the broad orange
strokes of a matchless sunset reflected off 80 acres of shallow water from all
the melting snow. It was unique and grand. I'd love to show you, but it was
late and time for me to get home. Yesterday, fifty degrees of warmth was a
reminder that, maybe soon the long dark night of cold will once again be
history.
In the darkness
in the early verses of Psalm 77, Asaph tells himself to remember the miracles
of his own people’s grand narrative: Moses parting the waters and bringing water
from rocks; snakes raised up high in the wilderness. He urges his own doldrums away by remembering how the Egyptians wilted under the barrage of calamities—boils and bloody
water, flies and pestilence and other God-directed horrors. He tells himself to
remember the stories of God’s faithfulness, the ones that are so immensely
memorable, the miracles.
Each of
us can probably sing our own repertoire of miracles: how my mother’s
emotional tribulations seemed non-existent after my dad’s death, for instance. None
of her children guessed that she’s adjust to life alone as she did. That our
children are well and happy. That we are.
My list is not as showy as an epidemic of frogs, as glorious as a being
freed from generations of Egyptian slavery. I can’t remember, right off hand, any
single event in my recent life that demonstrates supernatural interference in
my daily existence—no one who didn’t get on a plane that crashed or lived in a
house miraculously saved in the march of some killer storm.
But with
life itself soon to be arising from every square inch of ground outside, the
coming of spring is enough of a miracle to make me join the chorus of song soon
to begin outside these windows, the song Asaph wants so badly to sing.
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