Besides a Blueberry, Grace

I love blueberries. During the first day or two of class with a new group of students, I would give them an opportunity to ask any questions that would help them get better acquainted with me. On the first day, they were often not comfortable asking deeper questions, so I would get stuff like, “What is your favorite color? Where were you born? How old are you? What car do you drive? What is your favorite food?”

I usually required each student to ask at least one question of me that was different than the previously asked questions. Invariably, I would get variations of easy questions like what my favorite food was. They would ask, “What is your favorite fruit?”

To which I would answer: every summer when the strawberries ripen, I think that those must be the best fruit. But then the raspberries come along and, oh boy, if those aren’t my favorite fruit, but then, later in the summer when the blueberries ripen, it is no contest: blueberries are my absolute favorite fruit.

It is no surprise then that I list blueberries in my journal of gratitude. I was prompted by Ann Voskamp’s New York Time bestseller book, One Thousand Gifts, to write down things that I am thankful for, moments that are filled with deep joys, gifts that I know have come from the Giver of all good gifts to my heart. I started my list of a thousand gifts—at least a dozen or more times. I would scratch them down on random pieces of paper. I would record them in notes on my phone. I would jot them down in a journal that contained a hundred other random jottings of miscellania.

You can guess where this is going. I would lose track of my list after a bit. I never got very far. But when a friend gave me Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts Devotional which includes 60 “Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces” (her subtitle) and had pages in the back with numbered lines to a thousand, I decided to take the challenge.

I am nearing the end of my challenge, but how fascinating to look back over my list. I have birdfeeders and blueberries, the color teal and the taste of spring, plaid shirts and ten inches of fluffy snow.

But what about the weightier matters, ideas that go beyond the warm and comforting hollow created by my head on a flannel pillowcase on a down pillow. Do my morning thoughts go no deeper? Am I just counting mint leaves and cumin seeds, listing a tithe of things? “For you pay tithe of mint and dill and cumin, but have neglected the weightier things…” Matthew 23:23

What about the new kidney and liver that we prayed over for a brother-in-law? What about my husband’s heart miracle?

What about His mercy? His forgiveness? His gifting me with a new heart? His faithfulness? His loving me unto death?

How easy it is to forget the grace that carries me in His strong right arm or His faithfulness to forgive when I fail, again.

The juxtaposition of the deepest and the seemingly trivial meet, line vs line, in my gratitude journal, and, when you stop and look, this juxtaposition is also in so many stories in the Bible.

The disciples were thankful for a handful of grain, rubbing wheatberries together to get the chaff off on a Sabbath day (Matthew 12:1). David ate a piece of necessary bread in the temple off the table before the Holy of Holies. “The priest gave him the consecrated bread, since there was no bread there except the bread of the Presence…” 1 Samuel 21:6 Have I been eating bread without realizing the Presence? Have I noted the trivial without recognizing the Holy?  

The little details written in the Bible narrative:  Of noting that there were 153 fish in the net before partaking of holy breakfast cooked over a campfire and served by the shore. John was willing to untie a sandal strap but reluctant to baptize those unclad feet in the Jordan. Of hair being used to wipe the perfumed oil off feet that will climb the last hill, that holy hill, for you, for me. An unseamed garment gambled in an unseemly way for the privilege of seeing that truly He was the Son of God. Of mothers given to another to care for while holding arms open to the whole wide broken world in need of that sacrifice of grace.

Often life is a mundane routine in the midst of a glorious miracle. Breathe in, breathe out. Our first breath of new life is possible only because of His last breath. Breathe Your last breath on our need.

He said, “Be fruitful.” I eat another blueberry and multiply it by noticing the smallest of blessings. Even noticing these smallest of blessings, these seemingly trivia things, can multiply our joy till all we can exclaim is that all is a blessing, that all can be used for His glory. Even, nay—especially, my brokenness.

I eat another blueberry and take up pencil and paper to catch fleeting moments, surfacely mundane trivial things, and write down words, the best of which are sentence fragments of the WORD that gives light and life to all.

God’s Grandeur

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,

     It will flame out like shining from shook foil.

     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck (heed) His rod (authority)?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod:

     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

     And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare not, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins