Every year I can count on it. By the time Easter Sunday is here, the sun is in just the right place in the sky to awaken me each morning. Its bright sliver of light pierces through my bedroom window and beams right into my eyes. I don’t need an alarm clock.
It used to annoy me. Now it comforts me. After 10 years in this home, it reminds me that no matter what the circumstances of my life, whether my house is filled with children and guests and celebrations or I am home alone with my dog — the sun will rise and wake me. Easter will come.
I can count on it.
Beyond the steadfastness of sunrises, spring has much to teach us. Nature, in all her glory, demonstrates the courage to relax in the mystery of what we cannot see.
Mark Nepo, poet, philosopher, and one of the deepest thinkers (other than my father, of course) that I’ve ever read calls it, “The Courage of the Seed.” In his book, “The Book of Awakening,” he writes, “All around us, everything small and buried surrenders to a process that none of the buried parts can see.”
How true! Oh, to be like the seed, to rely on unseen forces that will nurture us, sustain us and foster a growth we cannot imagine.
As my father often reminded me, especially when struggling through a difficult time with unclear choices, “BB, honey, sometimes we have to trust the process.”
I smile at those words. I remember challenging them a few times. It seemed so passive to release control of a situation to the unknown when I was sure there must be something I could do to fix it. “But Dad, I thought you taught us, ‘What’s planned is possible.'”
And he had. He walked that talk in every stage of his life and his ministry.
“Still true, BB. But sometimes we don’t know all the possibilities. We do what we can and then we have to trust and let God handle the rest.”
Nature shows us that time and again, especially in spring.
Nepo continues, “In nature, we are quietly given countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which ultimately is an awakening that is beyond all imagining.”
And so spring reminds us have the courage to surrender, to trust, and to be confident in the processes we cannot see.
Happy Easter! Happy Spring!
This column was written by Rebecca Faye Smith Galli, daughter of the late Dr. R.F. Smith Jr., a long-time columnist for The Herald-Dispatch. Becky is a columnist and author of Rethinking Possible: A Memoir of Resilience. [email protected] Twitter Instagram @Chairwriter www.beckygalli.com
First published 4/15/17 Herald-Dispatch
Follow Me!