Here in my hometown, cooler temps and hints of Fall were followed by the effects of driving rain from Hurricane Helene. While I am thankful for that moisture here that converted the cracked earth in my garden back to soil again, the news cycle lately has been more than just heavy. And so, before jumping into this blog, I want to dedicate this podcast to the millions of people trying to recover from the damages of the hurricane in the southeastern parts of our country. Would you join me for a moment of prayer for those who have lost family members or been displaced from their homes?
Father in Heaven, we come to you always grateful that we have a God that is bigger than any crisis or storm. We are grateful that we can approach you simply by calling your name and knowing with confidence that your lovingkindness is always available and ready to answer our petitions for help. Father, we pray for all those caught in the fray of Helene, that you would restore their hope and that they would turn to you for assurance and know that the trials they are facing are not too big for you. We know you have deep compassion for their sorrows, so help them come to you in the difficult days ahead and find renewed energy. Bless them with the much-needed supplies for their families. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that you hear these cries for help and that you are ready to wrap your loving arms around them during this crisis. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.
Well, as the humbling pictures from the south continue to fill up our screens, we also have a country that is embroiled in the election of a new president which has been a storm in and of itself. Additionally, we have a Middle East war that has ramped up into a worldwide crisis. So, as I began to write this week, I began to wonder whether anything I had to say would be worthy of putting out there that would either give credence to the grim destruction I was seeing on the news or somehow, lessen it. Is there a part of you, like me, that would like to stick your head in the sand and stop the scroll? In a world where it seems like chaos reigns, I sometimes give in to the helplessness of it all and then buy into the lie that there is nothing I can really do about any of it.
“Well,” a friend of mine once answered, as I sat obsessing about my problems, “I guess the devil has you right where he wants you.”
“Whaddamean?” I stammered.
But I knew what he meant, and it was true.
We cannot rise if we do not stand. We can easily forget what we are capable of with God and relinquish our armor without a fight. Instead, we plant ourselves at the mercy of the enemy who loves nothing more than to watch our world burn in chaos. In other words, we can give up before we start, and allowed the king of hate to move into our hearts. Folks, that ain’t good.
There is no doubt that it is heart breaking to watch thousands of our countrymen bearing the weight of a storm surge. Then, across the globe, as we witness missiles lighting up the Israeli sky, knowing they will be returned with twice the force, our fears go internal as nations pick sides and square off. Those fears, if we are not careful, can become a picture that is more about us playing the victim than one about helping those victims. We do not need to stumble around in chaos and confusion. There is always something we can do when our efforts might seem insignificant, even if it is just a change of attitude.
Perhaps during this time when the world seems to be going mad, you can close your eyes and revisit a part of last summer …when you were being dunked with huge buckets of water at a theme park, or maybe watching your grandson hit his first home run or were smelling your favorite meal being grilled out back on the porch. All those things were in the mix for me over the last few months, reminders that the best predictors of the future are what has happened in the past. If you close your eyes and picture your favorite memory, it can lift you to a better place, to a promising microclimate of hope instead of a desert of victimhood.
My memory begins just outside my back window where there was a buzzing, swirling whirlwind. In a roundish berm I built, I watched droves of bumblebees flying all over the place as they gather nectar. In that area, I angled three huge sandstone rocks near each other so they could gather the sun’s heat all day and radiate in inwards. Even during the winter, as plant life goes dormant, the rocks emanate enough heat during the day to turn the area into a small canyon that acts as a thermal pocket during the night. Plants that would normally wither during the winter do not succumb as easily to the ice and snow or the thawing and heaving of the soil. It is an oasis for the eyes, in some dreary months when we’ve all had our fill of the grey and gray.
Last summer, however, that same area becomes a hotbed for a tough annual called gomphrena, a workhorse that produces blooms all summer, and thrives in one-hundred-degree temps when other annuals are wilting under the heat. By late summer they are three feet tall, bulbous and trying to outreach other in their head-to-head race to the sun. When a fellow gardener visited me last July, we stopped to marvel the sea of bumblebees swarming over my miniature canyon filled with those giant purple flowers of gomphrena globosa.
“Did you know you can pet bumblebees?” she asked.
“What? Pet them? You are joking aren’t you?” I asked, incredulous.
Before answering, she had already stepped into the tall mound of purple flowers and was surrounded by bumblebees. They were momentarily startled by her presence, performing fly-bys and barrel rolls, but each eventually settling down on their own flower top.
“You have to go slow,” she said as she reached in, “they are very social, not like other bees. If you’re careful you can rub their backs.”
Gently, she reached in towards a particularly porky bee and put her finger on the yellow and black striped body, stroking it magically for a few seconds before pulling back.
“See? They don’t seem to mind as long as you don’t move too quickly.”
Now it was my turn to get my moxie going. Although my hand was not quite as steady as hers, I slowly leaned forward, and found the tiny fuzzy back of a bumblebee, letting my finger caress it while trying to ignore the ones that were wildly buzzing from flower to flower around me. In spite of the thought that I may need an EpiPen at any moment, it was exhilarating to connect with something that could zap me with instant pain. It was an even better experience when I shared it, with permission from their mother, with my grandsons. They too, were able to pet their own bumblebee before summer ended, and become, not paralyzed with fear, but part of the one big happy swarm.
In these days when our country is ramped up with mega-doses of drama, including the political kind, you may be looking for some moments of lightness, levity, and laughter. I found mine in the smallest of places, on the back of a bumblebee, but even so, it lifted me into another realm where fear was a bystander and where wonder and delight and the joy of being alive had a chance to catch a buzz.
I didn’t think I had much to say this week. I was deep in the middle of the rockets flying, the pundits screaming and the catastrophic pictures from the south. However, on a very hot day last summer, I found some bliss in a petting a bumblebee and making it part of my own warm and fuzzy. I didn’t like the frenzy of crisscrossing flight patterns around me, and the thought of a painful sting didn’t do much for me either, but in stepping into the flower bed and beyond my fears, I found I was stepping away from my worries and the world’s madness. I found a bunch of bumblebees that were willing to work with me, and for a brief moment they let me in to their flower patch unimpeded. I was trying to pet them, and they were giving me their own kind of a pat on the back. In the middle of our shared world, the bees and I were going about our business, both looking, as I think we all are, for the same thing – some of that sweet, sweet nectar that is still out there.