Storks and Watermelon Seeds or Tears and Rainbows?

The thickest parts of life bring an onslaught of conflicting emotions and drives. Here's the goal: not living with just body and mind... but with spirit and heart... with my whole self; trying not to leave out even just the smallest part of me that God made (because why am I here if it's not to live with purpose?). It's not easy to trust wholly in my unseen God because the physical world tells me He does not always make sense. He, who I believe made this world with all of it's beauty and splendor... also allows its' darkness and nonsensical happenings. But, the beauty wins. It does, if I focus on it long enough to become grateful for what I see, and also remember that 100 years is so very short compared to eternity. Through tears of sorrow, the beauty shines... and sometimes the combination of the two results in a rainbow.


Often, even the beauty makes no sense. And why should it? God tells people who read about him that He and man don't think alike. We have different minds than our maker. For example, look at my own favored topic of birth. What in the world makes sense about a person carrying a separate life within the space called a womb? To have another person... growing deep inside, underneath veins and capillaries, adipose tissue, muscle, in a sack of waters, and then coming out of the most secret place we women call our own. The very parts of our bodies that we share intimately with our mates are the same parts from which our young emerge to take their first, glorious, air-filled breath. Couldn't be anyone but God thinking up the real deal. If we had it our way, we'd have birds dropping babies on our doorsteps (hence the stork). Or, we'd eat watermelon seeds and they'd somehow grow to be babies. Those are the stories we've come up with to delay telling our children the beautiful, strange, messy truth.

He certainly wanted us to see something important when He made it all the way it is. It's more than world peace, people needing each other, and keeping life, neat, clean and orderly. There's a mystery in it that we just don't fully comprehend. What makes sense about being born at all... knowing intrinsically we are meant to live... we are meant for life, only to absurdly die anytime at all... young, middle-aged, or old and wrinkled?! Maybe the guy in Ecclesiastes had it right. Is everything meaningless?


The exquisitely confusing, sometimes stunning way life plays out compels us to either go deep in thought and push our minds to the very edges in order to find the buried sacred truths that lie in our hearts and which peek at us through life experiences... or, conversely, to stay on the surface and make up stories about storks and watermelon seeds.