A Hidden Work

It was a mid-November day, and it was perfect Fall.  There was a crisp coolness to the air, but enough sun to keep my jacket off.  The morning had been spent suffocating indoors, weighed down by my own sin and the mess of the house.  We were fighting for clean, but I was being crushed by the weight of the mundane.  There is always cleaning to do, and new inspiration leads to new projects which necessitates new cleaning...  And then there is the daily bread, which once savored becomes dishes and sweeping. It is the grand monotonous cycle of daily life - and we are struggling to push back the chaos just enough for space to live and breathe. But all too often thriving is traded in for surviving, and I forget the point of the struggle.  The point of the struggle - or that there is something more than struggle.  I forget the hidden work that is being done in the dark.

The cleaning moved from inside to out, as the day of the slaughter was upon us.  All our plans for a helper for Hubry and a party for me and the children had been cancelled, and so it was a movie for the children in the attic and Hubry and I alone with the rabbits.  Hubry was doing the slaughtering and the dressing (which is really undressing) while I stood around with clean hands carrying things to and fro -opening  books and pushing play on the youtube video that was our guide.  And while I was not needed I swept the porch, washed the outdoor windows, scrubbed the table and chairs, and organized the pots.

It was in the organizing of pots that I was reminded of the work being done in the dark.  All around were pots half-filled with sterile soil - plants and seeds long having lost all signs of life, but never having been dumped out.  It is easier to cast the pots to the side and forget about them until they are needed in the Spring.  But this day was a day of busying my hands and being available to Hubry, so I set out to clean and organize all the pots - discarding the wasted soil and stacking them neatly on the outdoor shelf. 

As I was dumping out the soil from my white, ceramic pot I noticed three bulbs fall down to the ground.  They were Paperwhite bulbs which I had totally forgotten about, and they had been hidden inside the soil since last December.  Strangely, I noticed a bright shoot of green sticking up underneath one of the bulbs.  When I picked up the bulbs I saw that they were all sending out 3-4 of these beautiful shoots - shoots which spoke life after nearly a year of being left alone in a forgotton pot.

I was struck by the work that had been taking place inside those forgotten bulbs - work that was happening completely independently of my conscious acknowledgemnt of it.  And I was encouraged to see the hidden work which is being done in the dark places of my own heart - the very places which seem forgotten.