spreading mulch

Rain dots the windshield. Soft new light scatters over the sticky pollen haze, glistening through the baptismal weather. We pull into the parking lot at school, where kids and teachers already work in community, industriously rolling wheelbarrows and large, wheeled trash cans, plunging shovels and rakes into mountains of mulch.

They pause to acknowledge us and wave as Adam flings open the door and Riley gathers her things.

With the mulch, those shredded bits of dying tree, they ready the ground for new life. Growth begins right where we stand. The mulch seals in the living water, and broken more, it will fertilize the soil. God has been telling the same story for years: the dying tree, the broken seed, they always give way to life.

I smile, watching the kids change the world, the way they work together, the way they visibly build something so much more than mountains of brokenness. If we tell you the paper-thin facts about our kids, if we pile up challenges like bits of shattered bark, you maybe gasp, maybe wonder aloud how we manage. But when you see them–see them built into community like this, see them creating something better, you understand our blessings. You begin to see the way their shared strengths outweigh the individual ways they struggle. You begin to see how the broken bits of our lives, like planted seeds, give way to life.

Riley opens her door just as a friend moves by, rolling a trash can full of mulch. “Hi,” she says brightly, lifting a joyful hand.

“Hello,” he says, pausing beside the door. “I need your help,” he says without preamble, without pretending self-sufficiency, without the need to work up courage toward vulnerability. Need is a fact; not a weakness.

“Okay, I’m coming!” Riley says, propelled by the simple implication that her efforts matter to someone else; that she’s wanted and needed and able. I love that about this community; everyone has something to contribute. They are each one uniquely-abled, as the sign says just below the name of their school.

So close to resurrection Sunday, I sit back against the seat for a moment and marvel at the ways God tells his story again right here. We could all foolishly reduce our lives to mountains of paper-thin evidence as to the difficulty and transience of temporary things. But when we live and love and work in community, we become so much more than that together. And as we gather up love-shattered bits of the dying Tree, as we take them up, as we follow and use them to cover over the earth, as we readily admit that we can’t do it alone, we ready this world for Life.

I watch the kids a moment more, watch them laugh and brighten as more and more of their friends arrive, and I think,

It’s such a good Friday.