This sixth-floor waiting room has wide windows, overlooking the city, which from up here has more trees than buildings, by far. In the far distance, a buzzard wheels and rides an updraft, and in the foreground, there’s a butterfly riding another updraft, up at what seems to me a dizzy distance for a butterfly, that fragile patron of herbaceous borders and flowering shrubs.
I walked yesterday morning with my camera — because my camera makes me go more slowly and look at the light on things more than I would walking empty-handed — and going slowly I saw how the world was just drenched in glory, and I was glad.
On the other side of the world, children are growing up in war zones and a hospital was destroyed by what ought to have been friendly fire. Nearer home, people grieve school shootings, and babies are parted out for profit, and sin so blinds that the glory becomes invisible.
And I can see where the questions come from: what kind of a love is it, that paints the leaves on a billion trees, gifts the butterfly and buzzard equal buoyancy, and lets bombs burn sick people in their beds, lets babies be torn limb from limb?
What kind of a love is this?
What kind of a love lets guilty ones walk through glory-drenched October mornings? What kind of a love gives His perfect Son for the profit of ungrateful murderers? What kind of a love offers thieves the inheritance of a King?
This is the Love who wore our sins and drenched the ground with His own innocent blood and exalted Himself to redeem our ruins. This is the Love who will be the death of Death itself, who will banish mourning and crying and pain.
He crowns small ones with steadfast love and mercy and fills us with gladness in His presence.
This is the Love.
©2015 by Stacy Nott
Between Blue Rocks 