Sunday Morning Serenity

My mother’s favorite hymn is “Blessed Assurance.” Probably a close second is “For the Beauty of the Earth.” I never connected those two before, but this morning when I was sitting on the porch of the Story Shack, having the coffee that is required to make me human in the early hours, both songs popped into my head.

Right now, there’s nothing I find more assuring than the beauty of the earth. I think it’s because I feel so removed from everything else. For my parents’ safety, as well as our own, Dave and I have been keeping our social contact to a minimum, which doesn’t often bother introverted me, but every know and then I get this overwhelming sense of disconnection.

That’s when I go outside. And it gives me assurance. The earth was so beautifully and divinely engineered that it has survived everything we’ve put it through, though not without serious and lasting damage. It has rebounded in our confinement.

Years ago, my friend Art and I were on Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River for Southern Living, guided by a Cajun fisherman. As we glided past centuries-old cypress trees, he said something I’ve never forgotten. He said white men once accused Native Americans of being uncivilized, but native tribes lived on this earth for hundreds of years without leaving a footprint, so now who’s uncivilized? (He put it a little more bluntly than that.)

We so often judge other people in relation to ourselves, when we should see them—and ourselves—as part of something far bigger.

My parents get that. They sit on their back porch and talk about the critters that come and go as if they know them personally. Because they do. There’s “that lizard with the stubby tail” and “that hummingbird that won’t share the feeder” and even “that wasp that stays on the railing all the time.” They share their back-porch world with the lizard and the hummingbird and the wasp, maybe because they know who was there first.

Me? I’m looking out the door of the Shack, watching for that big brown rabbit who has been turning up lately and hoping he feels welcome in the overgrown shrubbery at the edge of our yard.

Another Mama favorite that’s speaking to me this morning:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord,
which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved:
he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper:
the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
he shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in
from this time forth, and even for evermore.

Psalm 121

Comments

[Pam Lolley]

Thank you!! I so needed this today!