Sweet Spring!

The Flowers Jessie Willcox-Smith

You sprinkle the day with light
like a confectioner with sugar
your sweet melodies birds recite
and the blossoms your fingers uncover.

What is this array
but a bouquet of your arranging?
What is the soft form of my heart
but a confection or your own shaping?

This your menagerie of living things
too delicate to last and too pretty to eat,
but yet a shame not to savor
delicacies so sweet...

from poem The Sweetness of Promise

...


It is a land the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end. So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—  then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.

Deuteronomy 11:12-15  NIV





 

Happy As Kings

Gyo Fujikawa, The Little Land

Happy Thought

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

- Robert Louis Stevenson from A Child's Garden of Verses

I love the simplicity of this short poem. Stevenson wrote so many wonderful poems to the sensibility of a child. My friend, Nancy Dauterman, first introduced me to Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses when I helped teach in her Kindergarten classroom. Those poems and her sweet Kindergarten class were instrumental in reuniting me with my own child heart. I highly recommend this book to all children and their parents. The illustration here is from my daughter's own copy illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa. It's wonderful.

I can't help but find a parallel between Stevenson's words and the way God calls us his children, while also calling us heirs to his own kingdom. Is that amazing? God himself has written to us as a father writes to his own children, hoping we'll read as the very children he knew, trusting and seeking - all the while pouring out his unexplainable blessing around us - as we pass by unaware.

Wake up little children! Let's be kings again!


This is my version.

Afternoon

I strolled the afternoon
like a child through a mansion.
I peered down burnished avenues
like corridors flocked and brassen.

I reveled in every jewel I found
like an orphan playing a prince,
as if every silvery sight and sound
was sealed in my inheritance.

I skipped through tree-lined vaults
laden with tender gold medallions,
knowing the treasures here where I walk
are stored forever in Heaven by the thousands.

::

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

::

Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

Romans 8:17-21