In the woods behind our church, a
pair of hawks have built a nest high in a cradle of oak tree limbs. For those
of us who are crazy about such things, it has caused quite a stir. We stand
back there straining to see what’s going on until our necks ache from craning
them backward, and we’re nearly blinded from squinting into the sun.
We can’t see inside the nest, so
we ask ourselves questions like: Is there a clutch of eggs yet? When will they
hatch? How are our raptors doing compared to the ones at Cornell University
where we’ve been watching the live cam? The Cornell hawk, Big Red, tends to lay hers
in March, so we’re hoping we might have eggs, now, or perhaps soon.
You see what I mean about being
crazy over such things?
We’ve been looking up in the
spirit, too. To quote much beloved Dr. Mark Rutland, who once said something
like, “God is up, but He’s not up.” We look up knowing God is not sitting on a
compass point as we understand directions, but still, we do it.
We stand with expectancy, eyes
turned heavenward, even while our hearts sag with grief, praying that God would
work a new thing on this tattered planet. We long to see a great deliverance, a rescue
of Biblical proportions, a stop-the-clock, stand up and notice work that only
God could do.
We look up for a people under siege,
in trenches, in former subway tunnels turned underground bunkers, trying to
survive in cities stripped of normalcy, and ask for God to soon intervene and
stop the aggression.
Images of war sear into our
brains the enormity of the brokenness, but we continue to look up. The Psalmist
wrote, “I lift up my eyes to you, to you who sit enthroned in heaven . . . Have
mercy, have mercy upon us . . . “(Psalm 123: 1, 3).
We echo the psalmist who perhaps was
also a person in captivity or under siege, “Have mercy.”
We have many questions about this
situation, but we will not stop turning our eyes heavenward, because we believe
nothing is impossible for God.
When we gaze at the hawks, we ‘re
reminded to look beyond to a God who sees their perilous nest of straw and
sticks and who sees the calamity in Ukraine, and we remember the words of the
apostle Paul, “. . . in Him all things hold together.”
We pray, "Hold this old world
together, Lord." We continue to look up. (Colossians 1:17).
Beverly Varnado is the author of several small town romances from Anaiah Press including her latest, A Season for Everything. All are available at Amazon. A memoir, Faith in the Fashion District, from Crosslink Publishing is also available as well as her other books, Give My Love to the Chestnut Trees and Home to Currahee. She also has an Etsy Shop, Beverly Varnado Art.
To explore the web version of One Ringing Bell, please visit bev-oneringingbell.blogspot.com
Beverly Varnado copyright 2022