[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Mud Season

I almost hoped we'd skip it this year. The snow was so heavy that the 
tulips were pushing their way up into the sun before the end of 
run-off. We had some wonderfully pleasant days there, mild and sunny. 
So maybe this year, just for a change, we'd go straight from very 
late winter into very early spring without Spring Mud Season.

Fat chance.

Yesterday was pure Spring Mud Season: sodden and ugly, miserably 
cold. Today it isn't actively raining (yet), but it still has that 
nasty interseasonal feel, as of a low-pressure system settling down 
for a leisurely visit. And of course the melting snowbanks have left 
their little deposits behind, most of them unpleasant. Even a very 
pretty town like this looks grotty in Spring Mud Season.

I have to sigh and remember that this season has its virtues. It's 
the time in which the landscape tells us what needs to be cleaned up 
or dealt with. It's at this time that we inventory what needs to be 
tackled next. You can't fix a structural problem with the bridge 
right now, because the river's in spate; you'll have to wait until 
low river in August. But you can note what needs to be done.

This is the point in confession, or in the Fourth Step of the Twelve, 
or in accepting that we're sinners who really do need Christ to save 
us: it's not a question of beating ourselves up for what we've done 
wrong. It's a question of determining what needs to be dealt with -- 
what needs to be cleaned up. And if we can't manage it by ourselves, 
asking for help from One who can.

But it's something we tend to avoid doing. It looks like hard work. 
It may involve confronting stuff in ourselves that we dread 
confronting, just as we don't look forward to raking up and dealing 
with the sodden leaves that we didn't rake last fall. Easier just to 
let Mother Nature deal... and with sodden leaves, that may be just fine.

The problem is that sodden leaves may do no harm, but our unexamined 
issues may do much, to ourselves and to others, especially those we 
love. We're propelled by emotions based in old hurts, or by 
unexamined assumptions, or by the need to win, and we're so driven by 
these compulsions that we don't see what we're actually doing. We 
visit our stuff on those we say we love, and it hurts them and hurts 
our relationship with them; it builds barriers and enmities. And then 
we stand among the rubble and wonder what went wrong.

Or rather than dealing with our own stuff, we toss it to Those Evil 
Awful People Over There. We feel the purity of anger and judgment -- 
and oh, anger feels so cleansing! I'll rid myself of this old ghost 
by tossing it into the river -- well, what does that do to the river? 
I don't care. It feels so good to judge surely and cleanly and 
powerfully, forgetting that it's not our business. I'm not here to 
take anyone else's inventory. I have enough work of my own.

I've watched these patterns happening in a couple of situations this 
week, and they remind me of situations I've been in, both wounding 
and being wounded, and they make me intensely sad.

I have to trust that just as spring is inevitably around the corner 
in a matter of weeks, and this current ugliness will vanish into 
beauty, so God has the power to redeem and transform us all, even 
when we seem to be nothing more than Mud Season incarnate ourselves.

Meanwhile, on one of the milder days last week, I collected, rinsed, 
and put into recycling several very muddy plastic bags that littered 
my front garden. I haven't got out to the back yet -- there's still a 
fair bit of snow there -- but I hope to, as soon as I can. I know I 
have my work cut out for me, but it will be pleasant, when the sun is 
stronger, to get out there and start cleaning up.