the oil of joy
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
Isaiah 61:1-3
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted…
to comfort all who mourn,
3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the Lord
for the display of his splendor.
I pause, my fingers nearly trembling over the page.
In our yard, that bush, a diseased, craggy thing, grows nothing save sick stems, and the stems an unnatural green, light but somehow deep, like the sheer, starving skin barely covers something rotten. Leaves still grow, but not the broad, flat, water-studded kind that glisten after a rain, holding the drops like cups. These leaves, born of blight, come forth shriveled and rough, like bits of crumpled paper. They hold nothing. Life slides by, and grace, and that bush dies.
I look out over steaming coffee, the mug cradled in my palms. I see myself already bending, gloved hands hard-gripping the center stalk. I need to pull that bush.
It’s time; time to yank out death and cultivate the ground; time to fertilize and plant something new. Tiny birds, two, maybe three, newly launched from the nest, hop in the snarl of stems. That bush looks hardly like a bush at all, more like a tangle of the past; like me, in days when I looked well but lived sick. How long, I wonder, did I go on wearing ashes?
Exceptional parenting begins with grief, and still, folks believe we’ve known nothing in our lives but joy.
[bctt tweet=”Exceptional parenting begins with grief, and still, folks believe we’ve known nothing in our lives but joy.”]The birds, dove grey and smooth as suede, look out of place playing there, like toddlers chirping as they explore a ruined house. I want to tell them about better places.
I remember when we planted that half-moon bed against the fence; I always have to turn the dirt with my bare hands. I enthusiastically nurtured those plants, gently tamping down blended soil around the tender roots, carefully watering until I knew them well established in invisible places. The bushes should have grown hardy—strong, resistant, and prolific in blooms. Certainly, we gave them every opportunity. Sometimes you do that, all the conscientious things, and still life falls apart. But I play the gardener and creation testifies, and nothing ever really lives without the anointing of the Spirit.
The Gardener draws near to the brokenhearted.
Disease overtook the first bush about the time a Japanese Maple pushed up a surprise sapling in the same little bed. Life happens in a garden; it buds pure truth.
[bctt tweet=”Life happens in a garden; it buds pure truth.”]I never saw the mites on whom the experts blame the virus that came; I think maybe those mites too tiny for my dim eyes to see. And after all, we live without control; we anticipate imperfectly. Sometimes that’s the way with things that infect and destroy from the inside. Too late, I learned that good Gardeners protect their plants with horticultural oil, an anointing that keeps the leaves too slick for tiny mites to find purchase. Disease spread from bush to bush, killing all three before they bloomed in their third year.
My eyes drop back to the page. This passage drips with the oil of anointing. Despite my rebellion, God loves me too much to leave me unprotected. God’s anointed King anoints me with joy. The King comes, on a mission to transform my grief, and yours. And beneath his tending hands, I become a strong planting after all, with leaves that do not wither (Psalm 1:3), with hands spread wide and cupped for blessing.
