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A friend of mine posted this . . . and I thought it was really well written and wanted to share it with you . . . this is not original with me . . . its a friend of a friend . . . but its still good . . . read it . . . think about it . . . enjoy it!          – Amos 

I can still remember the first and only time I felt ready to throw-up at the sight of blood. Not in Saving Private Ryan’s opening ten minutes, but on a cloudy afternoon outside of my piano shop in Jr. High. I was waiting to get picked up, clutching my smooth-laminated lesson books to my chest and watching with bemusement as the pedestrians bustled around the other shops in the sleepy strip-mall. A fluttering sound caught my attention, and looking down at the sand-colored cement a few feet away, I saw a tiny trail of ruby blood and at it’s end, a hopping pigeon with a severed foot, cooing softly. I know pigeons are generally seen as dirty creatures and a pest, but something in me broke. I don’t think it was life threatening – I’m sure it healed up and went about it’s one-legged life (or at least I have to believe that, because a bird bleeding to death is too horrible for me to contemplate) But there was just something truly awful about a being of flight grounded and in pain it had no way to communicate – just the standard unintelligent coo and the confused wobble of imbalance. Grounded flight seems some sort of incapsulation of the fall, doesn’t it? Torn wings, fallen innocents, hollow bones made for soaring turn unsuitable for the hard life on the ground. I couldn’t get away and I didn’t know how to help the poor thing. I think I saw a few adults trying to catch it and help it as I was driven away, feeling disturbed and sick to my stomach.

I’ve seen a lot of dead birds this summer. I’m sure it has something to do with an inordinate amount of cats in the house, but there’s something about a maimed sparrow (apart from natural distaste for death) that makes my stomach turn. Something about a being with wings lying in delicate disarray, like a crushed rose bud on cement, effects me like a real corpse, even if there’s not a speck of gut or blood. Maybe it’s because Atticus told Scout so long ago that it’s a sin to kill a mocking-bird – all they do is sing and don’t bother nobody. Birds to me are innocence and simplicity and beauty, flight and freedom. And i’ve been no better off these months for Emily Dickinson’s famous poem:
     
Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune–without the words, 
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm.

“Well that’s wonderful, Emily, and surprising from a thoughtful recluse like yourself – I’m glad hope sings strongest in the gale and through the night and all that, but what happens when the cat gets it?” My inner cynic is more than just jealous of Donald Miller’s affection for the sensitive poetess. It wants to shove a tiny, fallen, feathered frame in the face of all that piece purports so poetically.

But lately I’ve been thinking, no offense to Dickinson, that hope is a lot sturdier than hollow bones and darting eyes and feathers. Birds are beautiful and innocent, but with short attention spans, and no brains and a delicacy that necessitates their existence above us mortals. And that just can’t be hope, can’t be the faith that I’ve read about.
Such a flighty creature seems to have no place in Hebrews 11, leading patriarchs through deserts and growing in the midst of potential filicide and germinating in the steadfast prayers of barren old women.

Every Sunday since as far back as I can remember, a man named Joe has tithed flowers. I’m certain he writes his checks like everyone else, but this is the quiet offering that has always caught my attention. Every morning, usually in the near-empty sanctuary with only the practicing worship team for an audience, Joe slowly walks up with a loving smile directed at his blooms arranged in a crystal, and ever so gently, he slides his gift to the middle of the wooden altar, just before the cross, and walks away, still smiling, to go on to his next task. Joe is a strange, frail-looking, but enthusiastic old man – he is too eager to help, sometimes to all of our embarassment. He has sometimes given an impromptu worship song on his harmonica, when he is supposed to be simply reading the passage for offering, the kind of thing that makes your cheeks burn for his kindhearted, but inappropriate outburst. He plays the saw, a leftover from his days as a vaudeville performer, distorting hymns strangely and leaving us all unsure of whether to be amused by such an odd instrument, or sobered by the expression of genuine devotion etched on his features as he draws the violin bow across the bent metal. In my younger years, he was invariably the butt of some subtle joke, though it never sat well with me, even when I participated – it felt like picking on a crippled bird – a crippled bird that wears cowboy ties and sometimes entire suit coats of eye-burning red. One day when I was a little older, though not much, I happened to go to Joe’s house – I wish I could remember why. The first thing that I of course noticed was his abundant and varied garden – all kinds of roses and lilies, peonies and more threatened to overwhelm the simple chain link fence that tried to keep them contained in the modest front yard. This made sense. I remember little about the inside of his house, but I do remember being a little frightened by a full-grown man with a vacant look, drooling, in a wheel-chair. He was clearly mentally retarded, and he was introduced to me, as I felt shy and awkward, as Jim Siracusa, Joe’s son. This did not make sense. All I had ever seen from Joe was joy and flowers. I was too young to remember when Joe’s wife passed away, so it must have been well on 15 years ago now. To this day, Jim Siracusa is on my church list of people to pray for, for healing. It speaks volumes to me that Joe has never had him taken off the prayer list, never given up, and always hoped for his son to be healed – and wouldn’t consider it disappointment if that day existed only in eternity. But it speaks most loudly of all that week after week, he cuts the flowers he carefully nurses to health and beauty and lays them before the cross. After my visit to the house, I figured I owed him at least silence at the jokes directed at him when he can’t hear, or when I failed to do that simple thing, at least sincere and burning repentance at my shortcomings. I don’t think we can laugh at people’s eccentricities until we understand their heroics.

I think hope partners with sacrifice and it partners with expectation. The beauty and the faith is that Joe cut down his beautiful, beloved flowers every single Sunday, and put them in a jar to die on the altar. The hope is that he knew they would grow back, and that even if they didn’t, somehow, this was the fulfillment of its growth.
My friend James very wisely said:

“You see, it doesn’t take much of a man to say “oh well, I will resign myself to whatever torments the world will throw at me.” I mean, that’s just a part of living in reality. Even to give up everything, to become the complete ascetic, although tremendously difficult, falls short of faith.

Faith continues to hope, even as it lets go of the world. For we must let go, as Abraham does, and as the Rich Young Ruler fails to do. But faith hopes in what is unseen. Love always hopes, always perseveres, and love never fails.”

And that struck a chord with me, because I can reconcile myself to pain and suffering, but he’s right. Faith and hope go beyond reconciling yourself to suffering. It means seeing joy in the midst of suffering, planting and harvesting roses in a home that would breed bitterness and questions with most. More than that, though, I think hope is a thing that’s alive in a very different way from our fragile feathered friends. Steadier, slower, stronger, more stubborn in hardship.

Hope is a thing with roots and leaves. Long in growing, alive in the truest sense of the word, yet still and fixed and unmoving, except by millimeters as it creeps towards the sky over months and years. It comes everywhere, in every shape, drawing from desert sand impossibly deep to find unattainable water. It sprouts in forgotten corners of dirty asphault courts and with time, proves stronger than even cement slabs, cracking through the worlds pathetic ideas of permanence. It tightens its skin in drought, makes its own food from simply sun and soil, it germinates in darkness, in decay, springs from death, keeps itself alive with a stubborn temerity we hardly expect from something that seems so simple. Hope breathes in all our sorrowful exhales and gives out the sweet breath of life, wafting fresh air into polluted streets and crowded minds. It bears fruit – petals or seeds or fragrance. It springs from doubt and blooms faith, and promise, if we can only plant the seeds in our darkened, damp souls and beg for growth. A Greener thumb than all our withered hands grows our deserts into gardens, grows our ashes into beauty, blooms salvation from a twisted crown of thorns.

And this is hope. It may not soar above the tree tops, but it grows healthily in our yards and gives us much needed shade. It is hard to remember that, in the summer, in this unbearable dry heat that seems to wither all the leaves I’ve grown – scorching the green with apathy and doubts and distance and judgement (and dead birds still nagging at the back of my mind).

But I am determined to sow these seeds –
He who began a good work will be faithful to complete it
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize
Then we shall see face to face, and know fully as we are known
He will wipe every tear from their eyes, there will be no more death

And I will wait for them to grow. In Spanish, the verb for “hope” is the same as the verb for “to wait”. I think there’s nothing more fitting as its equal in meaning. I will wait, and plant these seeds in this shoddy soil, and cover it with the mulch of my decaying strength and water if with my utter dependence and see what springs from the ashes and when it is grown, I will cut the blossoms with thankfulness, and follow Joe to the altar, with joy, knowing that hope is not birdsong, but unstoppable, renewable GROWTH.