I sat down by the lake to read the first 4 chapters of Mark. That was my to-do list. I sat under a tree, making sure, before I sat down, that the square foot of grass that I would be sitting on didn't have poop or anything gross on it. Settling in, I got one chapter done when I started smelling something foul. Figuring that one of the animals had recently defecated nearby, I didn't budge from my spot, serenely thinking "this is all part of nature."
About halfway through Chapter 2, the rain started. One of my favorite things to do in the rain is to get in my car and listen to the metallic pin-pin-pin of the drops hitting the roof. But there was no metal around, no concrete, no buildings, no cars, no bicycles, no windows, no screen doors, no roofs. Just the lake, the tree above me, and the grass.
Softer than a whisper was the rain. Earth quietly watering itself around me. There is God in this place.
And then I smelled it again. This time, with my nose out of the book, I looked around. And thats when I saw that only 3 feet to my right was a dead decaying bird. A small one. I would guess a robin or a finch, but it was so far decayed that I could only recognize its birdness by a few feathers sticking straight up.
Of course, I thought, the place I settle into and experience God, death is right next to me, stinking up my space.
The rain beat this dead bird hard. The raindrops were not gently dropping on this little carcass, but hurling down quickly and with quite a bit of force!
I watched, against my right mind, as the rain hit and hit and hit this body and eventually revealed one of its ribs of its chest. The rain was speeding this decaying process more quickly than I anticipated.
A death occurred here, however slowly or quickly, however predicted or sudden. And now no life lies in these wings. A heart here is just a matter to return to the earth. Slowly, nature moves on, taking the physical memory of this flight and feeding it back to the dust it rose from.
But the rain.
The cleansing, harsh rain. Movement does not let a thing rest. And this time, it... it... beat the death out of the dead.
love this
ReplyDelete