My childhood pastor, Glen Wiberg, who died a few years ago, left the most wonderful image and story of the essayist E.B. White behind. It blesses me in every resurrection season, as I see the perennials suddenly, breathtakingly appear again. Though you’ve likely heard it, I must share it again. Wiberg writes:
E.B. White writes of watching his wife Katherine planning the planting of the bulbs in her garden in the last autumn of her life. He wrote: “There was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance…the small hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.“
Wiberg reflects, “What a provocative phrase: ‘plotting the resurrection“! Katherine was a member of the resurrection conspiracy, the company of those who plant seeds of hope, seeds of tomorrow under dark skies of uncertainty and impending death; people going about their living and dying until, no one knows how, when, or where, the tender shoots of life appear, and a small piece of creation is healed. That’s who we are as God’s Easter people — those oblivious to the ending of our own days, calmly plotting the resurrection.”
The pithy saying rings true: we don’t know what the future holds but we know who holds the future. This new life Christ has planted in me will survive my death as it grows nearer each day. I can live with hope, even under dark skies because of this. I can plot the resurrection now even from this mortal veil. While I must experience “mortal ills prevailing”, I can defiantly keep planting seeds of life with faith in that one “whose kingdom is forever”.
As far as I know, my health is adequate. A recent annual physical and blood tests did not set off any major alarms. I am not attempting to morbidly communicate some infatuation with death. No, quite the opposite I hope — that though more of my human life is now behind rather than ahead, life is really just beginning! And God has made it so, once and for all in Jesus, the Holy One who came out of the death that wanted to have a lasting hold on him, and said to the world, “You also will live.”
Can you plot that resurrection life wherever you are just now?
Love From Here
Peter Hawkinson
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