The Details of Life

The leaves lie flat around the stone birdbath.

Their green is fading.

Their reason for staying attached to the overhead branches is over and done with. The summer shade and retreat for birds is no longer needed.

Just a few weeks ago the wind had taken up these very same leaves and they were blown about on their stems like a full skirted dress on a dance floor.

Swish swish swish.

Their time of attachment has been used up and now it is the time of their falling.

Thousands of them served a purpose in the wind and shade and nesting and they serve it now in the falling and dying.

The tree just stands there like it’s nothing to be publicly undressed.

It stands there like the shedding of its outer garment, its beauty,  its tree-ness, is normal.

The details of its life; its leaves, coming unglued, coming undone from its limbs, doesn’t faze the tree at all.

The details of my life, these things I must do, these things that cover me, make me what I am, or what I think I am, can be my undoing if I cling to them when they are long past purpose.

Hanging onto routines when change is required is like filling up a junk drawer with the Necessities of Maybe.

My refrigerator is a food junk drawer these days.

It’s because I’ve forgotten how to cook small.

I’ve forgotten what a meal is supposed to look like when it is just me and him.

Now the children are leaving and I am making too much spaghetti sauce.

I throw away cereal that has gone soft  in the cupboard.

I buy the extra large laundry detergent because I think the hamper is full and I change the sheets on unused beds.

My normal routines and details are shedding, falling away from me and I am stripped of what I have always known.

A House Full.

Refrigerator Full. Spaghetti Pot Full. Laundry Basket Full.

All this leaving leaves me wondering about the details.

Wondering how to leave the old details of life for new ones.

Wondering what  I will do after the shedding, after the leaving.

The detachments, some are blowing every which way, others are fluttering slow slow slow to the ground.

I will probably stand there, bare for awhile, perhaps the cold wind of dormancy will buffet me for a season, making me stronger, forcing me to go to deeper.

There will be surprises along the way.

Jesus is like that. Healing on the Sabbath. Interrupting funerals to give the dead back to the living.

Surprises.

Like roses  in October.

New chapters, new seasons, new details cascade all around me.

There is less food in the cupboards to prepare and less laundry to get on the line, but there are more babies and more daughters-in-laws and more extended families and more growing communities of faith… and there is always more Jesus for right now and for the time to come.

He’s got the details.

All the thousands and thousands of glorious details.

Brilliant, God.

Just Brilliant.