Ugly Days

It was, what I think my grandmother would call, an ugly morning.  Clouds filled the sky and thousands of gnats, the kind that always promise rain, gathered around me as I walked.  When I pulled into the church parking lot, I made a silly demand of God. 

Show me something amazing.

I hadn’t even parked the car when I saw a large bird swoop over the church, a breakfast fish in its claws.  It landed in the tree out front and I knew, just by where it perched, that it was my shy osprey, the one that always flees at the sight of my car.

I didn’t want to scare him off from his breakfast this morning, but I could not pass up the opportunity to see a true circle-of-life-moment.  Since August I have shared many beautiful pictures with you, pictures that have inspired and nourished the frail bit of hope that is growing inside me.

But as I have written before, these meditations, due to the events of my life, have frequently dealt with life and death and I have used what I have seen of life and death in the natural world to help me cope with and heal the tragedies in my own life.

The truth is that our lives will always be filled with ugly days.  We may be restful and calm one minute and have a fierce osprey tear through our world the next.  We cannot hide from ugly days.  We cannot pretend they don’t exist.  They are real and they are part of the world for every part of this world.

We cannot rejoice, for example, in the resurrection of Christ without acknowledging the brutality of his death.

The world is filled with ugly days, with clouds and storms, but I have yet to see one that did not eventually give way to the sun.