Ben Wilson, LPC

~From Madaleine L'Engle in And It was Good: Reflections on Beginnings

Sometimes at dusk we see the loveliness of a doe and her fawn walking across the field, but they have stayed away from the garden, chewing instead the bark of tender new trees.

Broccoli, brussels sprouts, carrots, don't mind the cold. We'll be picking them long after the ground is rimmed with frost. We have discovered a new vegetable this summer, spaghetti squash, which we scrape out with a fork, after cooking, in long, spaghetti-like strands. Leeks are a delight, creamed, or in soup, and spinach salad. We glory in the goodness of creation every day. All that weed-pulling was worth it, though weeds have their own beauty, and, like mosquitoes and flies, are an inevitable part of the summer.  

At night now the sky is clear, with no heat haze. One night we eat supper out on the little terrace which we have made with flagstones and lots of honest sweat. We linger at the picnic table through sunset and star rise, and suddenly someone says, "How light it is on the northern horizon!" We blow out the lamps and there is a staggering beauty of the northern lights. There is something primal about those lights pulsing, in pale green and rose, upwards from the horizon. They give me the same surge of joy as the unpolluted horizon near the Strait of Magellan, showing the curve of the home planet; the same lifting of the heart as the exuberance of the dolphins sporting about the ship after we had crossed the equator.  

I sit at the table as we all watch the awesome display of beauty, and there again is the promise of the rainbow covenant of Easter, radiant, affirming.

And it is good.  

~Taken from The Westminster Collection of Christian Meditations

May you find beauty even with the weeds and mosquitoes in your life.