Remembering the Wisp of Time

While washing dishes, the music plays quietly in the background. Quiet songs.  Beautiful, gentle, peaceful; but, really, I barely take notice. Until, like a moment frozen in time, the words pierce through the myriad of thoughts in my head, "All flesh is like the grass.  The grass withers and fades.  The glory of man like a flower that shrivels in the sun and falls.  But, the Word of the Lord endures forever." (Fernando Ortega, taken from Isaiah 40).

The glory of man is like a flower...

I am listening.  Now, Lord, I am listening.  

While looking out my kitchen window at the fading tulips in my yard, I am listening.  Bowing and drooping and dying.   Their 'end' is clearly in the near future.

These tulips have been a joy to me these past weeks.  I have become a bit addicted in my looking at them from the kitchen window.  Planted with care, over the years we have lived here, they bloomed this Spring with gusto.  A parade of color!  They really have brought a great deal of pleasure, delight and praise.  He truly does make beautiful things.

But, they are now fading.  A whisper of time, really.  Didn't they just bloom yesterday?  Here today and then they will be gone.  Their splendor and vibrancy will be a memory.

God reminds me today that this is true about me, too.  This physical body, this tent, is just like these flowers or like the withering grass.  Life here on earth only a wisp of time... only the first few chapters in the book of reality and life.

But the Word of the Lord endures forever...