Shades

Dear Eugene,

Last night before Small Group I and my wife strolled around the church neighborhood.  The spring flowers are fragrant, houses pretty, people behind every door often broken.  This is our Father's world.

Standing under the shadow of a crabapple tree I pulled out my phone.

"Do you really need another picture of this?" my wife asked, genuinely curious.

"This one is different."

I didn't mean the tree in and of itself is more special than any other of the same species.  It was how the soft evening glow of spring sun casting its serendipitous gleam to bring out the nuance in fifty shades of pink.

(My wife made an overstatement.  I've just counted; only fourteen pictures of trees and flowers I have taken this spring, everyone special in its own way.)

Two days ago my son complained how the weather forecast has not been accurate in the past recent days.

"Have you been looking at only one picture or one number that claims to represent a day?"  I asked him.

After dinner he, reluctantly, came out to the garden and worked alongside me.  Just as what happened the week before, in a short hour the partly cloudy sky gave way to wind and then rain.  I swear we could see the sun smirking behind the clouds when it poured.  At least it was not hail; that would be very rude, as what I said looking up the sky when that happened last week :)

I am thinking about what to give a friend for her new career move, to a world of meeting many people and listening to their stories.  She doesn't need another Bible, not another book to explain or help her to explain the Gospel; too many already.  I think I will give her a short story collection of Russell Banks.

We are all learning to appreciate the nuance of fractured humanity in a broken world.

Yours, Alex

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