Hope

"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

Anne Lamott

" May your unfailing love rest upon us, O LORD, even as we put our hope in you."
Psalm 33:22

Sometimes waiting is the hardest work. Waiting for Spring. Waiting for love. Waiting to see if the goats are pregnant. Waiting to give God's love a chance to manifest itself.

But waiting is not the same as doing nothing. While I wait, I work. I pray with my hands. I plant seeds indoors, I care for the goats, I feed the chickens, I collect the eggs. I clean up the barnyard and make a burn pile. I try to do the next thing in front of me. I don't begrudge the present. Even when the present can feel like an endless February day. There is still plenty of farm work to be done, even in February when it seems like the world is still asleep.

The goats need to be fed and brushed. Carissima is starting to look pregnant. Either that or she is getting a beer belly. We're hoping Whisper is pregnant as well. The chickens are laying more and more eggs daily. A load of straw needs to be picked up and loaded into the barn. Bedding needs to be cleaned. Baby chicks need to be ordered. Starts need to be planted and watered.

And wild turkey season is right around the corner. And maybe a few more steelhead fishing trips. I love turkey hunting. I walk into the woods in the dark. Listening to owls hooting and turkeys gobbling from the trees in the pre-dawn. Finding a place to set up where I think they might fly down off their roosts. Waiting for the dawn to come. Waiting and more waiting.

February is like the glimmer of dawn before the sunrise of Spring. It's too early to really hope that Spring is here, but you can see a glimmer of it. You act as if Spring will actually come one day. You work, preparing for Spring for the dawn. And it does come. Dawn comes, the seasons change, Christ is resurrected, and the world is reborn.

What a blessing. We had a nice, sunny, warm late winter day today. The kind that reminds you that February does not last forever and that Spring is on its way. Blessings,