Crushed Flowers and White Squirrels

I started my Easter Monday with Scout on a beautiful morning walk. The air was cool, the sun was bright, and it was just perfect. About halfway through the walk, I noticed these little buds that had fallen from a tree and had been walked over and stepped on and were crushed along the asphalt. Still being in the Lenten/Easter mindset, I thought back to Good Friday and the tellings of Jesus’ death on the cross and the referencing back to Isaiah 53:5 - “But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” I got thinking of the struggles of I know many are going through at this time - a struggling family in the congregation I serve, the deep struggles of those of us who have been blessed by the writings of Rachel Held Evans who is very ill right now, people stuck in poverty and under oppression, and the list goes on.

Then not 5 minutes later, I saw a bright flash of white on a fence post and when I looked a bit closer, I saw it was a white squirrel. Something I’d never seen before. I just watched this guy bounce from the fence post over to the bushes and eventually up a tree. It was one of those, “whoa” moments - a true surprise just literally running across my path. I am not fully equating this to the miracle of the resurrection, but my prayers shifted at that point to the wow of the resurrection. The “did that really happen” of Easter.

That’s how life is - a mix of it all - the places where it feels like beauty and wonder is crushed underfoot seemingly without a care and then the places where something wondrous and surprising runs across your path. My prayer today is for those two places to come together more and more. For those who feel that the world has stepped on them to experience the surprise of the resurrected Christ running across their path.