Saturday is for flowers.

Nearly three years ago, I remember a dear friend bringing bright red gerber daisies to my office when a beloved student of ours passed away.

Sometime in the past few years, fresh flowers became a ritual of grieving in my life, as loss has seemed prevalent.

A bunch of stems or a bright potted flower are as essential as vitamins and vegetables when grief has struck. Blossoms and leaves make their way into my grocery basket, playing their healing roles.

When my uncle passed away on Ash Wednesday, it was almost a Pavlovian response. My home needed living color. The sweet plant with happy little yellow flowers is still gracing my bar in the kitchen.

Not just plants, but flowers.
Petals with radiant shades.
A sign of life and joy to brighten the room.
Blossoming, visual proof there life is persisting.
Pushing back and reminding death it’s not the only one in the house.
Blooms of hope talking smack.
Flowers showing dirt who's boss.
Sweet, hopeful salve to the fresh sting of loss.
Leaves reassuring us life is still here even when death insists we believe it isn't.

Flowers simply make me smile.

Bright, grinning daisies, muted and lovely, white hydrangeas, yellow Billy Balls, all kinds and colors of chrysanthemums, roses, and tulips. Some leaves tiny and round, others large and pointed; colors and sizes as numerous as the flowers themselves.

God’s creativity shows off in petals and pollen and I need reminders of it in the shadow of death.

Sitting on the counter, the sunny petals on my Kalanchoe flower are flopped open proving the opposite of where they’ve come from.

They aren’t just beautiful and cheery. They speak a better, hopeful word. Dirt doesn’t get the final say. Seeds teach us that those gone into the ground aren’t sentenced there forever. Dirt can't keep them from dazzling; it only helps them do so.

Life can’t be constrained by dust. God’s endless creativity can’t help itself.

Resurrection finds itself popping up in more places and ways more vast, unique, and beautiful than flowers. All sizes, shapes, and flavors of resurrection. Blooms tell resurrection's story.

And we, my friends, are so much more to our Heavenly Father than flowers.

So today, on this day we remember Jesus dead in the tomb, I bought and cut and arranged flowers.
To commemorate and honor death.
To smell life while loss lingers.
To be reminded that life doesn’t disappear in dirt.
That this, too, shall pass.
Burial is the first step to blooming.
For Jesus in Holy Week.
For Jesus followers into perfect, eternal life and relationship.

Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.” John 12:24

There will be a day when Eden overflows with a perfect garden of leaves radiant, lives resurrected, and love renovated. All things restored and whole; back to shalom, life as it ought to be.
A more redeemed version than we could ever even imagine or recognize as possible life.
It’s on the way.
The stone was rolled away, opening the door to all resurrection and restoration.
But before the tomb could open on Easter, it had to close.

Sunday is coming. Easter and Eden are on the way.
And while I wait, my house smelling of flowers helps me not to forget.

we weren't made for it: why I hate death and so does Jesus.

Words are kind of my thing. Speaking, singing, writing--those make up most of my life. This summer, however, words have come so slowly. It has been difficult to put language to the experience of losing a beloved student, Devin. I struggle to wrap my head and heart around the "new normal." And it hit me today walking across the park, as I became frustrated with my lack of words to share. We weren't made for this. We weren’t made to deal with death.

We just weren’t.

I’ve never really thought about it that way before. I’ve had the realization that we were not made to die. My friend, Jim, said so insightfully once that when God handed out the consequence of death after the fall, it's possible that Adam and Eve had no clue what death even was. It wasn't how they were designed. It wasn't what we were meant for.

We were meant for life; for everlasting perfection, in relationship with God, others, and the world around us. But temptation won the moment. Sin exploded into the world, covering creation with uncontainable death. And ever since, there are times that we just feel like it’s not supposed to be this way. And that’s because it isn’t.

We were not only created as eternal souls, but also to love those who are constant; God and others in the garden. Our hearts were designed for deep love and connection, to be won over by the beauty of others, and feeling more full because they are in our midst. Death is the opposite of the exact thing you were designed for. Deep love and connection is traded for deep separation and loss, the beauty of others is relegated to memories, and emptiness sets in where the fullness of the lost one’s presence used to reside.

We ache. Jesus ached for his friend, Lazarus.

Scripture even says that all the earth aches.

“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” Romans 8:22

It’s so easy to get stuck in the ache. I get stuck some days. Ticked that things aren’t the way they were meant to be and that the pain of death is more than we were ever made to handle. Refusing to let go to the life that has ended because it shouldn’t have. Overwhelmed by the thought that in our lifetime, that death, this thing we weren't designed to handle, will occur again and again. It’s easy to get stuck. 

In times like those, the stuck times, I go back to the one thing that helps.

God hated death. God hates death. Even more than I do, God hates death. God was so outraged by death twisting, maligning, torturing, slaughtering his beloved workmanship that he did something about it. Love moved him to action. He could let it go no longer. And at just the right time, he sent Jesus to live fully, die completely, and win life back again; only the first work of his restoring all creation back to its original “garden” state. It's a tough meantime we must endure, friends--sharing life with death until Jesus returns to say "no more." There's hope in that promise, though, that brings us to a new day. It motivates us to speak that hope to others, that they, too, may trust the complete life found only in Christ and that death doesn't get the last word.

There are days that I say, “Jesus, I’m not cut out for this.” And I imagine his half smile, saying, “I know you aren’t. Nobody is. But I’ve put life in your heart and soon it will be all you know once again. The life you were made for.”

fall: God's lesson about the beauty of death.

Since I can remember, I’ve been the little girl that loved to soak up every moment of summer.  No school, bikes, pools.  But something in me has shifted in the last few years.  After years of summer confidently standing in the number one spot, fall has wiggled its way in to gain the gold.  Maybe it was my first Phoenix summer a few years ago that began a wedge between summer and me.  At just that time, I returned to Minnesota for the most magical season of color and crispness.  Some of my favorite moments with the Lord have been spent running or sitting along a lovely walking path that parallels the Mississippi River that splits Minneapolis from St. Paul.  The path is best in fall with massive deciduous trees shedding color combinations only God himself could create.  The crisp air on this girl’s face inspired and empowered me with new energy; perhaps a necessary jolt before the winter hibernation set in.

It’s the perfect time of year for a walk with a sweater and scarf.  Just when it gets a little too chilly, you can find your way into a cozy coffee shop that smells of sweet cider drinks and warm conversation.  There’s just something about this season.  Fall makes me feel alive and romanced.  I grieved missing the leaves, the orchards, and the sweatshirt weather this year as I sit by the pool in capris and a t-shirt.  The desert doesn’t do fall quite like Minnesota or New England, but there are echoes of the same refreshing sentiment.  I love the smell of fire pits in the evening and the ability to be outside again after our season of summer hibernation.

This season just resonates in me.  Its beauty and romance are just captivating to me and I wanted to figure out why.  Why is a season of death so stunning?  That’s really what it is.  The trees shedding their dead and burying them into expired lawns.  It’s a gorgeous death.  I got a little concerned for a bit that maybe at my core, I was enamored with a season of dying and my future will be resigned to reading Poe and wear black jackets and eyeliner.

But I don’t think that’s the case.  What if God, at the fall of humanity, weaved His redemption narrative into creation?  I mean, that sounds pretty simple, right?  We see dead things making soil rich to bring new life.  New growth emerges from out of the snowy winter.  We see parallel stories to Christ everywhere.  Maybe it’s been obvious to everyone else all along, but I have been captured these past few weeks by this notion:  God weaved a season of beautiful death into creation’s rhythm so it would already be familiar to our souls.

Think about it.  Death is the most ugly thing in existence.  It can be gory, gross, the most destructive and permanent part of life.  It goes against everything we are as created beings to find death beautiful.  So perhaps God did some foreshadowing in nature to prepare us and familiarize our beings with this seemingly oxymoronic concept that is essential to the Gospel.  Jesus took the most horrid death imaginable and redefined love and beauty where a curse once lived.  It’s a stretch for us to believe that God not only makes beautiful things out of the dust and dead, but He made death itself beautiful.  God shedding and killing our old selves to make us look more like him is beautiful death.  In a very literal way, letting go of life here to enter into eternity will be the most beautiful and true moment our souls will ever know.  I struggle to grasp it all, but Fall helps me to trust it’s possible.  I’m grateful today that God helps us see images of His truth in what He’s created because He knows our lack of faith and understanding.  What a good Dad.

Some of the most wonderful glory I’ve witnessed has been through this season of death.  It’s taught me to pay attention in other life seasons where death seems to prevail.  In relationships, in jobs, in health, in tragedy.  The promise stands that God is making it beautiful.  If we don’t stop and take a walk among what is dying, we may miss the beauty He’s painting into death to woo us, comfort us, and draw us further into His romantic story of redemption.  May we never miss it.