Forgotten?

My favorite season has always been Autumn.  Beyond the crisp leaves, and the smell of sharpened pencils, there is something about the season that always seems to offer this underlying sense of security. Maybe it is the turn of the cold forcing us inside the safety of our homes, or perhaps it is the routine of the school day unfolding for yet another term. But it offers me familiarality. I curl up to it like a cinnamon roll, soaking in the comfort and inevitability of what is next to come.

Hot summer days can't offer me that same peace.  Even with the memories of the days extending for what seems like forever, the grass stained trousers from a long sticky game of tag, the bruises and scrapes from a 2 hour go at red rover and double dutch, it still feels unfinished. Unsettled. Open. Limitless.  I can get lost in those days, swallowed up by the prairie skies that go on forever. It's on those days I grapple with feeling forgotten.  Don’t we all?

My least favorite bible verse, where on days of feeling alone and forgotten can throw my faith to the wolves, has always been about God caring for his sparrows.  I flash back to spring yard preparations last year and my disturbing finding of a dead baby sparrow in the crook between mine and my neighbor’s home.  He nestled peacefully but mortally in the cushion of the uncut grass.  I walked past it, avoiding its presence, and pretending, as I often do, when faced with death or ugliness, that it really hadn’t happened. It really wasn’t there. Emotions numbing to their auto-pilot position.  Had God forgotten? And if he had, does he forget about me?

You see, I’m not one to wrestle with the concept of God’s love. My friends can sometimes get lost in debates about the crucifixion and resurrection, the virgin birth and miracle healings, and all the complexities really have no impact on my psyche. I get it, and the unfathomable, in some strange way, makes sense to me and my lens of this world.  I absorb it. Jesus as God’s own son, in flesh and blood who died for me because He loves me immeasurably is real to me. I feel the reality of His love in my life. He’s my empathetic witness.  He’s beside me on this road, on my road.  But here’s the thing I get lost in: the details. Does he really care about the details? And if so, why is this road so often so hard. And why, as I sometimes do, like this long summer night, feel forgotten? Like the sparrow, I nestle into my cushioned burial place waiting to be revived and rescued but so many walk past avoiding the ugliness. Avoiding the messiness.

But I am learning this: When I succumb and trust that the details are taken care of by the same Masterful Creator who cares for you, life gets easier.  I trust that the same source, who measured the pitch of the birds singing outside my window this morning, and colored, in intricate ways, the hostas that bloom in my flower bed; cares for me and has designed me in incomprehensible ways. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. (Psalm 139:15)   The ugliness then, the messiness, somehow, with His grace and beauty gets cleaned, redeemed, and rescued without my striving, my working it out, my pleading.  It is then I realize, that we are not forgotten. 

"He delights in every detail of their lives.  Though they stumble, they will not fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand." (Psalm 39: 23-24)