Duo Equinoxia: Part 2: Herald the Dawn

 The Vernal Equinox.  Light overtakes darkness.  New life.  New year.  Rebirth.  Resurrection.  Night retreats.  Days lengthen.  Snow melts, rivers swell, farmers plant, flowers bloom.

We have a dry erase calendar in our kitchen to mark events.  Usually it just has dates and birthdays and upcoming appointments.  The other day though, i looked at it and was struck by the quick succession of blessing upon blessing we had made note of in bold, vibrant, multi-colored all caps, one for each week.  As surely as September had been rife with pain, March has been joy upon joy, blessing upon blessing.

Only two days into the month my dear friend who had suffered so much including the seizure last September was quite unexpectedly and suddenly released from jail!  He was sent home on house arrest and work release when such things that we had so prayerfully hoped for at his sentencing seemed entirely off the table.  He was home before letters i sent were able to get to him.  He was in only long enough to develop a heart for the men inside and sense a new calling on his life: prison ministry.  Though he'll wear an anklet and be severely limited in his freedoms, he will gladly serve his time knowing when this ends, the sword that had been hanging over his head for years, incarceration, uncertainty, a chain around every plan he made, every dream he dreamed, every hope he had, will be gone.  The prisoner was called out of the dark dungeon into new life!  Glory be to God!

The following week my wife and i celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary.  We didn't do anything special.  We had a good meal in a nice restaurant but otherwise it was just a day off.  But what the day represented, the fact that we were still married to see it at all is a miracle only the God of Grace could pull off!  Behind us are years, YEARS of strife and anger and tears and talk of divorce and pain and misery.  But God being rich in mercy and according to his great love for us is able to do more than we ask or imagine, and here we are, not just together but in love!  The sweetness being all the more dear for the long dark years we have walked, limped, crawled through.  i cannot thank the God of redemption enough!

The very next week, still days away from the equinox, my eldest son and his lovely wife welcomed into the world their baby girl!  My very first grandchild had to be cut out of her mother but God is good and mother and baby are doing great and we are overjoyed!  We could not love her more and just the image of her every time i open my phone is enough to set my heart to skipping over mountains.  New life!  New joys!  New loves!  Thank You, Father!

What does it all mean?  i surely don't know.  i have no great theological points to draw from these two months and these events.  i just feel like God was drawing my attention to them in the ways they were ordered and clumped together.  Drawing attention to what He was doing.  He was faithful and true and good in the dark, he was near, we sought him in our tears and in our laments and in our confusion and storms and He was there, He was our Rock and our Refuge and our Comfort and at times even lessened the blows from what they could have been.  i am reminded we have no right to expect good from this world or this life, we have not earned it, nor do we deserve it.  Death comes to us all and sometimes before it does we get tastes of it, glimpses, previews.  Sin has made all darkness and unless the Light come into the world, the dark would swallow all.  

But the Light has come!  And built right into the rhythm of the seasons and the rhythm of life are the story line of the Gospel!  Redemption and forgiveness not in spite of death, not as a consolation alongside death, but right through death itself!  Christ used his own undeserved death, the only man who did have a right to expect nothing but good from God, took the wrath we deserve so we would not have to!  So we could enjoy the good things He deserves and expect even more!  And here we are, coming up on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, the time of Passover, the time when the Lamb of God without blemish, His only begotten Son, was sacrificed for us and then rose again to show us who He is and what He's doing, making all things new!  Come Lord Jesus, Come! 

Duo Equinoxia: Part one: The gathering dark.

 The Autumnal Equinox.  The dying of the light.  The day on which Night overtakes Day for supremacy.  The darkness grows and dawn takes longer and longer to arrive.  The Sun retreats to the horizon and can only seem to shine weakly for what little time it has.  As the Equinox approached last September, my family received shock upon shock, we knew it at the time, we were aware that it was a hard, dark, pummeling season but even looking back on it we marvel at how many painful things happened in so short a time.  

At the beginning of the month, my brother made a rare trek up from North Carolina because we were becoming aware that my mother was exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's. We were aware that she was forgetting.  That's how i had always thought of Alzheimer's: as forgetting.  We went out to dinner while my brother was here and mom's credit card was denied.  She always handles the finances for her and my stepfather so we assumed that she had forgot to pay the bill.  But in looking over the statement, my brother discovered she had been giving away thousands of dollars to scam charities and political action groups for months and when we tried to talk to her about it the rational, reasonable, college educated, intelligent woman we have always known, the rock of our family who raised us became an angry little girl who could not tell reality from delusion.  We had thought she was forgetful but we had no idea how the disease had warped her inner dialogue.  How it had become full of imagined conversations she had with people she'd never met.  In a moment when we thought we were losing our mother, the correction came like an axe in the middle of the table, our mom, the mom we knew was already gone.  Two men who had grown up together but never grown together were suddenly closer, maybe clinging a little harder as they felt the loneliness of losing our family.  A child is never too old to feel like an orphan when their parents are taken from them.  We strategized, made a plan and the reunion turned out to be a sweet time for each of us.  A gift of memory and redemption i would have cause to be amazingly thankful for in only a few weeks.

Days after my brother went back home, i got a text at work.  It was a picture of my son's truck and the front end was nearly torn off.  My eldest runs a lawn mowing business and he and his brother and a friend of theirs were all in the truck on their way to their first yards of the morning when a man ran a stop sign and broadsided them so hard it my sons's brand new, full size, crew cab, F-250 and trailer loaded with two zero-turn mowers, did its own zero turn 180 degrees in the span of an intersection to end up facing the way they came.  i cannot fathom the force that takes.  A tragedy worthy of Job was mitigated by God's grace and as it happened, the man who hit them got the worst of it, he was unconscious and we never found out what happened, who he was, why he was out running stop signs at seven in the morning, all we learned was that he had no insurance.  My sons and their friend were left with bumps, bruises and burns, sore joints that linger even still, the loss of a vehicle but compared to what might have happened had the impact point been the passenger door... i dare not even contemplate.

Days later, literally, we were still in only the second week of September, at Bible study a dear friend and brother in Christ started appearing ill and calmly informed he was going to have a seizure.  Now i've heard of those all my life but never actually saw one till then and i'll be very happy to never see another.  Here was this man who's life already defines affliction and tragedy losing control of his own body and there's nothing we can do to help but hold his hand and witness and pray.  Truly this world is broken, Father, come quickly Lord Jesus!  The seizure has its way and does its violence and passes on like a storm with nary a care for the life it tosses in its wake but if it shakes me just to witness it, what must it do to the helpless victim?

Four days later again a morning at work was interrupted by my brother's (yes the same brother, i have but one) wife calling to tell me in the matter-of-fact voice of a person in shock and holding on to the hard facts they know to keep from thinking about the future they no longer have any assurance of, that my brother is being airlifted to a hospital with a trauma unit.  He had borrowed a friend's brand new Harley to ride to work and was just getting out onto the two lane and up to highway speed when he ran headlong into a deer, was flung from the cycle, his head, neck, shoulder taking the brunt of the landing.  Life went on hold.  i finished the day but the next we were in the car heading south.  A trauma ward, a coma, again, a body no longer in control of itself.  Eyes fixed at nothing.  Unable to breathe without machines.  Sudden arrhythmia that would shake him and make his vitals drop.  We kept watch by my brother's side, holding a hand that had the warmth of life but none of the vitality or motion, not knowing if he would ever wake.  And if he did, to what would he wake?  What would the damage be?  Who would he be?  

Equinox in North Carolina.  Night overcomes Day.