7 Quick Takes-Spring and New Life

For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at Conversion Diary.

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Happy sixth day of Easter to you! One of the things that I love about being Anglican is that Easter lasts even longer than Lent. We get to celebrate right up to Pentecost. This blog had a great quotation from N.T. Wright about how Christians should celebrate Easter. I especially like the part about champagne after morning prayers for the first week. I have read this passage before, and I think Wright is spot on. Without the resurrection, Christianity has no meaning. So celebrate! And if you want to read a good article about why the resurrection matters, check out this article by a dear friend of mine that was in this month's Christianity Today.

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The plants and trees are celebrating Easter by sending out lots of pollen. If you don't live in a place that has a lot of pine trees, you don't know the joy of walking outside to see everything coated in a layer of sticky yellow-green pollen. Really, you have no idea how horrible this stuff is. Here is a picture from a couple of years ago.


Yes, that is pine pollen coating my son's bum and the slide and our porch and cars and everything inside and out. That was after a good rain, too. This year, it was dry, record heat (90ish) and windy when the green scourge hit full force. Folks said it looked like fires everywhere with the clouds of pollen blowing. Let's just say I am glad we decided to trek over the mountains this week for Spring break. It is much better in Tennessee.

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As nature is putting on a show of new life (my favorite right now being the dogwood blooms), it seems many folks are welcoming new lives into their homes. So many of my friends had babies and announced it on Facebook while I was away for Lent, and I am enjoying looking at pictures of their little babes. And this blogger and mother of five boys, whom I discovered just recently, just welcomed her first baby girl. It gives me hope...not that I am planning on trying for a girl or boy any time soon or that I am even sure what I would know what to do with a girl. But I am enjoying reading her stories of life with all those boys.

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Speaking of boys, mine are growing like weeds, and I am taking full advantage of the warm weather to watch as they blossom into little boys. Even sweet Linus is working on growing up on me. He is walking so much now, though not all of the time, and becoming very independent. While he keeps his agreeable disposition most of the time, he is not afraid to let us know what he wants. He screams and points and throws a tantrum until someone figures it out, and then he instantly smiles and returns to his normally pleasant self. It is almost like two different babies.

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All of this life all around makes it hard to accept the death that our family is facing. We are also in Tennessee because my grandma is nearing her death. Even in the grief, though, we know that she is going to enter new life and to prepare for new creation. She is ready to go and be with her Creator and see the face of Jesus. That is one of the beauties of the created order, isn't it, that nature in her yearly death and rebirth reminds us of the truth of our rebirth that happens even as we die.

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I was able to do a bit of a family history interview with my Grandma last month. Now that I am unable to continue it, I am pondering the preserving of memories in the reality of eternity and new creation. There is so much that is lost over the years, and I do think we can learn a lot from the past. At the same time, we have become a culture obsessed with documenting our lives, taking thousands of photos and updating out status every day and tweeting or twittering or whatever it is that people do. I think we obsess so much over documenting and preserving memories that we don't actually make memories or really live in the present. It is like scrapbookers who are thinking about how they will turn an event into a scrapbook page even as they are participating in it and taking photos of it. Anyway, I just think that at some point we have to trust that all of those memories that we lose along the way are being held by God for us to pull up and remember in eternity.

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And now, a lighthearted Calvinism to end this Quick Takes:

Nana (to Hobbes, who had just told her about a computer game): "Really? That's interesting!"

Calvin: "You're just pretending to be interested, aren't you?"

Nana: "No, Calvin, I really am interested."

Calvin: "No you're not. That sort of think doesn't strike your fancy."

The turns of phrase that boy picks up from reading. I love it!