Hepatica

We wonder where it will end. What if? What will happen? Our heart eyes jump forward to the future's unknowns.

In the wild winds of March, in the uncertainty of the ups and downs of the weather and viruses and world situations: the winds of change still remind us, God is bringing all things to a new spring. The March drizzle will not delay his spring, but only heralds coming dawn, sprinkled with pink dogwoods and mirrored by pink-lined spring beauty.

In the uncertainties of the world, Jesus says, "Come, walk with me." As we pant up the hill of unknowns, Jesus talks our hand and calms our beating heart. He is not worried; he asks us to pause stop and see his hand. Can you catch his hand and sense his surety?

Through the narrow, crooked gate, up through the path lined in fallen leaves. We are prone to walk past it, to get to the end and see where. But Jesus pauses, and points out the nest from last year: the cardinals will build again, and he sees each sparrow.

We are tempted to walk past it, but Jesus takes time to stop, halting us with a tug of his Spirit and hand. Stop, look. Look at the beauty of the deep green juniper at the bend. A contrast to the grey worry-winter. See? The evergreen a sign of his faithfulness, ever true, ever living.

The craggy trees hardly capture our eye. But Jesus pauses and exalts in the artistic lines of the twisted branches, the sheer majesty of age of wizened, thick trunks. We pause and see a sign of the God who is unchanging, eternal, in the ages of the trees.

Down the glacier-carved gullies of fear, up and then down another, around the bends of unknowns, we begin to catch Jesus' present pauses. "Look, a duck on the swamp! Look, a squirrel on the branch!" The journey becomes rich, seeing his eyes, his hand, present.

Then, then up to the east, at the base of an oak tree: the hepatica. Brush aside the fallen oak leaves, the falls that had heralded the worries of winter. But underneath God has been growing: the beautiful hepatic. First of the wildflowers in the woods, it comes out before the spring beauty, the more tender squirrel's corn and dutchman's britches. The black cohosh and geraniums have not peeped. The crocus has--in the protected garden. But here in the wild, in the chills of the winter-weary woods, springs the hepatica. Beauty from God's own hand.

Come, walk with Jesus. In the worries, fears, unknowns, pause to see the junipers, apple trees, nests, and hepaticas of his faithfulness and presence.

I tried to capture this in a poem. The sapphic is a closely structured poem, with a certain syllabic meter. The sense of anticipation and searching, carefully within the structure of God's sovereignty, God's power, God's love, and God's poety.

Hepatica Loose Sapphic
Come, might hepatica be out to welcome
Early spring? Up the hill and around the trail
Up to the bank where the hepatica grows:
Here we look for spring.


First to appear may be the crocus dainty,
Raising her head in a sheltered garden bed.
But the hepatica still in winter’s chill:
Surely spring has come.


Under aging leaves in musty winter’s smell
Still edged with morning’s frost and lifting fog,
Base of oak, brush it clear and find nestled there
Spring’s hepatica.