Through Stained Glass: Place (Guest Post)

Today's midweek reflection is by First Presbyterian Church member, mother, writer, poet, photographer, adventurer, and whimsical warrior, Kelli Owens. Today's words are inspired by the lessons from the first Sunday of Lent. You can check out more of Kelli's writing at her blog, Chronicles of Grace, by clicking here.

It’s 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. The windows are open and birdsong has become a subtle background soundtrack. Children run in and out of the house, now the trampoline, now on bikes. Humorous banter and playful destruction rival each other in intensity. Our old family dog nips at their heels and allows herself to be subjected to treatment she wouldn’t have a few years ago. There are shadows in the grass from the trees beginning to leaf and mud on the bottoms of their feet and I just swatted at a lazy fly. Today all feels right with the world. Even shy spring is finally making good on her many promises.

Perhaps a day like this is what we’ve needed. Without storm damage worries due to high winds. Without rain pelting us during the run from the house to the garage. Without snow. There’s something healing in the eventual realization of what we’ve been waiting for. Something about promises made good that helps us endure the messiness of living in the not-yet portions of our lives.

Because that’s where we are most of the time, right? Waiting. For bad news or good. For progress or regression. For death or resurrection. Lent is about many things, but one thing it is certainly about is liminality. The tension of being not yet where we’re headed, but definitely not where we’ve been. The intermediary, the journeying, the wilderness, the between. Wendell Berry could have been talking about Lent when he wrote these words: “There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.”

This Lent, in all her uniqueness, has put a new spin on that word “place.” We have traded our comings and goings for sheltering-in-place. And in some ways, this is fitting. Obviously as an act of compassionate solidarity with the vulnerable among us, but more personally as a way to explore our relationship with the idea of submitting ourselves to limitations. Finding place in the midst of the way (to hearken back to Berry) means realizing that while it’s right and good to say that journeys have destinations, it’s also not wrong to admit that so often the destination is in the journey itself. That the healing comes as we go.

I’ve been watching the tender buds push themselves open on my apple tree. Every day they swell a little more - what’s inside reaching outward. I wonder if theirs is a journey that mirrors ours, liminal tension urging them onward. Perhaps the natural changes to our physical world help exemplify what is best about this season of promise fulfillment and the creative energies that belong to it as we travel from Lent into Easter. I can’t say for sure. What I do know is that in the daily-ness of checking a bud’s delicate progress as much as listening to growing children’s raucous laughter? Well, there’s joy.