Happy Easter! The week in white

Here are pictures from this week in white

Blossoms on Fuji Cherriy trees that line our driveway

Hellebore Lenten Rose

I'll add pictures this week. In the meantime, Easter post from 2008.

Happy Easter

Slightly out of focus flower bouquet for Easter on messy table

Hellebores "Lenten Rose" far left bottom

All week long there have been continual challenges, so I get on my knees and pray. I seem to forget that every Lent there are struggles, not always self imposed but everything out of wack and unusual things happening, like the lights out in the cottage for a week, glass breaking as I carry flowers through the gate in a vase, words from my mouth getting mixed up in the air and ending up in someone elses ear jumbled and distorted.

On Good Friday our pastor made a wooden rugged cross with large nails toward the ends of the crossbar. Several of us including myself, went up to the cross, picked up the hammer laying at its foot and hit the nail with the hammer in recognition of our sins, transgressions and struggles for which Jesus died.

God's grace has been evident in many more ways such as helping in the impossible task of coordinating independent islanders including myself to be on the same page for the program this Easter morning without piano nor pianist Creative minds came up with instrumentals downloaded to ipods and placed on the speaker system so a song leader could lead the songs in the service. Everyone had a part even the children placing flowers at the foot of the rugged wooden cross. Although the day was a cold downpour of rain, the service was beautiful, warm and meaningful. The head of Nightwatch in Seattle came today to preach and without knowing it began by reiterating the emotionally moving pounding of nails in a heavy wooden piece of cross, his wife reading , "He was wounded for our transgressions. "

This week was about how I need to change: the difficulties getting through the week except on my knees, the double pointing out the reason Jesus died for me and the grace now available, the new beginning that is Easter. May everyday be a new beginning for you as well.

Easter

This week, instead of writing, I took an oil painting class from Matt Miller and was reminded of my first blog a year ago "fallen". (see it copied below)

"Fallen" by J. Matt Miller

"Why would I want to buy a picture of a dead bird?” was the questioning look I got when I bought Matt’s oil painting titled “Fallen”. He painted and posted it on his daily life painting blog on Good Friday. In the past I talked to Matt about painting birds, but he said they don’t sit still long enough for real life painting. I recall last summer when our grandson, Andrew, and I sat at our dining table drawing a bird. It was a window-crashed-dead pine siskin after which we buried it with ceremony, a cross as its marker.

Easter Sunday, Matt told me that he did paint a bird on Good Friday, one that crashed into his living room window. I looked at his blog and woke up on Monday knowing I had to buy the painting. I spent the week pondering why. Yes, I have a "thing" about injured or dying birds. Ask my kids. More than once I dragged them and various boxed birds with concussions through rush hour traffic for 20 miles to the Seattle Wild Bird Center, then the only state-licensed wildlife clinic in the area. I learned a lot about helping birds survive a crash.

So now, in our island home closet sits an electric heating pad and a cardboard box with towels just for these occurrences. The picture reminds me of two winters ago. Upon hearing the all too often terrible “thud” against the window of our island home, my heart and I race outside to find a spotted Tohwee, feet up, not a good sign. As only its red eyes move, I gather it in a soft towel and place it in the box, out of the way of noise and traffic, and set the heating pad to low. All the while softly muttering, “Please God let it live”.

With many hours passing and several tries taking the box outside and lifting the cover to release it, it finally flew to safety. Often when I see what I think is “the” Tohwee scratching at the grass for seed and scurrying with its mate under the lavender bushes that line the flag patio, I thank God for its revival. Perhaps I need to do more about the ignored problem of our window glass.

The Bird Conservation Network gives some solutions mentioning window glass crash as the number one human caused bird mortality with an estimated 1 billion birds killed in the U.S. each year. I’ve hung metal birds from the door frame on a raffia chord and stuck an outdoor chair in front of the glass door, neither of which works well. I pull curtains when we are gone.

So today I try “designer” vertical lines of soap every four inches down the window. We’ll see what my husband says when he gets in. “I still think a barn would be best for you,” was his response. Maybe so, at least there are not many windows to crash into.

But then, God, don't you know when a sparrow (or tohwee) falls?1 Don’t we all continue to exist by Your will? You, God, say how much more valuable we are than birds.2

 Stuck in my head this week is the song that we sang on Easter Sunday, “Crucified, laid behind the stone, you lived to die, rejected and alone, like a rose (or a rose-sided Tohwee), trampled on the ground, you took the fall and thought of me, above all.”3 You found me fallen because I saw and worshiped a reflection of your image, not you. I've worshipped a reflection, a visual barrier, that is the form of religion, not you; my own independence, not your way, my sometimes greater interest in birds than people.

You picked me up, wrapped me warm, and put me in a safe place. You loved me so wondrously, God, that you took the fall and died yourself, your substitute sacrifice, not for birds who still obey your commands, but for my sake, so I can be revived and set free. Did you sacrifice the tohwee so Matt would paint it, I buy it, so every time I look at it have a visible reminder of my worth to you Lord who died and rose for me, what Easter is all about.

Notes: 1. Matthew 10:29 2. Luke 12:24b; Matthew 10:31; Luke 12:4-9 3. “Above All”, Paul Baloche and Lenny LeBlanc.

By the way, a year later, no more fallen birds at our windows, the "designer" vertical lines of soap work.

Dead Spotted Tohwee (alias Rufous-sided Tohwee)

Pipilo maculatus L 7 ½ (19 cm)

Friday, April 06, 2007 Painting by J. Matt Miller

"Fallen" 8x10 oil/linen