Slow

Walking down the Winter road, everything the color of bone, you could miss all your new beginnings. Faster, faster. Even the street seems like a challenge to hurry, the landscape like a warning. Time is running out. The bare trees reach, branches like skeletal fingers, like venous tributaries invisibly leaking life into thin air, like hungry roots futilely climbing nowhere.

Can these bones live (Ezekiel 37:3)? The ancient question sinks, buffeted by blanketing clouds, and I slow, staring. These trees, they look like graveyard trees. Without touching their flat gray trunks, I feel the cold seeping into my fingers. Here and there, I see an abandoned nest, empty, or a stubborn leaf, crumpled brown, still clinging.

But slow, my gaze drifting over these ghosts, I discover buds, tiny, camouflaged stem-grey, covering these bare trees in promises. Winter has her way of sealing up the truth, of hiding the secret work of creation. Most of the time, I’m just too frantic to see all of the careful signs that life resurrects again, and these I would certainly have missed had I not slowed my steps for a closer look at this deception of death.

Focus on the unseen, scripture urges, because what is seen is temporary (2 Corinthians 4:18). Winter won’t last; weeping won’t last; the frost melts now beneath the morning sun. Hidden things come into focus when we slow down to see. I whisper it as I crane my neck, as I cradle new stems in chilled fingers: Slow, a growing season turned into my one word for a new year. God has written that word, simple but profound, deep into the heart of my pleas to see. Slow, because stillness precedes the knowing. Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), the Psalmist wrote, but ironically, we read it quick, swallowing the briefest measure of God on our way out the door. Be still, we read, smiling happy while yet we go, go on feeling like these bare, bony trees, cold and emptied of all assurance.

But slowly, beyond the scope of my gaze, those promise-buds become leaves unfurling.

The resurrection has already happened, and the story has already begun again; I’m standing still at the tip of a narrative hook: This dead wood isn’t really dead at all. We know of God what He chooses to reveal, and He has the one condition: Be still. Slow down, He says to me, hand upon my shoulder like a mama drawing in her running child. Watch me bring dry bones to life.

So I slow, breathing a fuller, deeper breath.