Easter

About 6:00 tonight, my husband and kids had gone down to swim in the river for the first time this year, and I'd stayed behind, working on my laptop out in our front garden.  My husband has planted all sorts of things there inside the fence, where the deer can’t get them, and it’s a wonderful place to sit when the weather is so lovely, as it is now. 

I was thinking and finishing things up for Easter, and I heard something that made me look up—I saw two fat squirrels chasing up and down a bent-over live oak, chirping at each other.  My eyes moved to a tiny green lizard climbing up the trunk of a small bush just ahead of me.  Right next to it, a bee buzzed around a clump of bluebonnets that have already blossomed, running off the butterfly that tried to work the other side.  Two red cardinals hopped around in a different tree, while the brown and mauve female they might have been fighting over fluttered to a perch about 8 feet from me.  The squirrels reappeared, tearing through the tops of the trees that run along the property line between my house and the neighbor’s, zooming all the way to the back of the house.  And a gray hummingbird flew very close, whirring right up to about 12 inches from my head, as if she had something to tell me, as if maybe I had some nectar in my ear or really red lipstick on. 

All of this happened within the space of just a few minutes.  I felt like I live in a wildlife preserve.  I don’t know if there’s any profound meaning to it all, except that God is good, and it’s really nice to get to sit outside now and then.

Bloodshed

The events of the past couple of weeks in Gaza (more than 120 Palestinians dead), and now today in Jerusalem (8 Orthodox rabbinical students shot and killed), are weighing heavy on my heart. I'm not even sure what to say--my instinct is to try to summarize what's happened and then comment. But instead I'll just say that the only thing this proves is that violence is not going to solve this problem, and somebody's going to have to be the one to decide not to go that way anymore.

The other thing to remember is that in addition to the back and forth military/militant violence, there continues the everyday violence experienced by Palestinians living under occupation. The thought of people in Gaza dancing in the streets over the 8 Israeli deaths in Jerusalem is terrible, and at the same time, the situation they're living under is absolutely untenable. Desperate people do desperate things. That doesn't make it OK, but it seems like there are some ways to reduce that level of desperation in the lives of Palestinians, ways that would only help move the land toward peace. There's a chicken-and-the-egg thing going on here, and addressing issues of basic dignity would be one place to try to break that cycle.

Again I'm remembering the call of Christian people in the land of Christ--pray for peace, work for justice non-violently, and look with determination for God to make a way.