A - Z Challenge - N: Noticing

Today is the first day of Spring, my favourite season of the year. Today is rainy so I am staying inside, but yesterday was the very best sort of day, the kind with sunshine and blue sky and little shimmers of colour in the corner of your eye wherever you looked. Remarkable really, as only seven days previously we'd been making snowmen. Only in England. 

This year the Spring Inspection is difficult for me. It's much lonelier, as my mum isn't here to see it and enjoy it with me; it was her favourite season too. We'd count down the days, stand by the window willing the weather to take a turn for the better and snuggling into blankets and throws while we waited. At the earliest opportunity we would carefully step outside to take a walk around the garden, latterly with mum leaning heavily on my arm and me always with an eye to the nearest bench or bit of wall on which to have a rest if she'd been on her feet too long. 

We'd wander round (always clockwise, for some reason) and hunt for signs of new growth. Tiny buds, leaves, shoots - any signs of life after the dullness of the winter hibernation.

Nothing went unnoticed as we gently cradled buds, avoided stepping on the crocuses and aconites, picked up fallen twigs from the silver birch or made mental notes of Things That Need Doing. 

Yesterday, Mothers' Day, I walked around the garden on my own and life was waiting for me. The snowdrops are nearly finished, the crocuses still spectacular and at their peak, daffodils just beginning. The hyacinths smell gorgeous, the muscari just beginning to bud and the currant bush looking as if it can't contain itself much longer.  

What undid me was the magnolia flower. Just the one flower on the stellata at the moment, although other buds are forming. The reason I stared at the single flower for so long with tears running down my face was that my Mum loved this little magnolia bush. It was a present from my brother and myself many years ago, but we had to move it from it's original spot  because of building work, and all gardeners know that magnolias are particularly grumpy about being moved. 

The star of the show

I was all for ditching it and buying another, to be honest, but Mum wouldn't have it, and she was in charge. So, we dug the biggest hole we could, took as much root as we could (it took two of us to lift it) and we planted it in a place far away from diggers and builders' feet, and we tended it as best we could. For years, the stellata sulked. No flowers for many a spring, then a handful of weedy, sickly looking  droopy flowers more like wilting splats than stars. In recent years it has looked definitely alive and doing ok, if not actually thriving, but I thought that maybe it was as good as it got. 

Every year there were the jokes about the magnolia that I wanted to kill, the one I didn't care about, the neglected one, the plant with hurt feelings - and here it was, one big, fat, happy-looking flower, and no Mum to see it. And, looking at the rest of the bush, this year looks like the year that I am forgiven. I'll post some more pics if I remember. 

I am reading a book at the moment about the importance of noticing things. Noticing the small things, the minute glimpses of joy and mystery and beauty. I realised that I used to write about it too - how the little things matter (sometimes vastly more than the so-called Big Things) and how the little things are vital for your soul. For my soul. I am determined to start noticing again.

It has been hard. I don't blame myself for shutting myself away from the world, withdrawing into myself and my small, insulated place of safety, because things have happened to us that meant it was the only way I could cope. I'm not sure there was another way, to be honest. But here, it's spring, with its newness and hope and it's sparkling, indomitable spirit, and, like that magnolia stellata, I must stop licking my wounds and harbouring my grievances and see if I can muster a flower. 

I have no idea if this is possible. If it turns out that it isn't, then alright, maybe some other time. I'm done with making promises (and this A-Z challenge is testament to that!) and I'm not ready to set goals. I just feel that I want to put it out there that this spring, heartsick as I am that Mum isn't here to see it, maybe I want to push towards the light with a new green shoot. 

Maybe nobody is looking, and that's alright. Maybe I am the only person to have noticed that immaculate stellata flower, but it would have opened its petals even if nobody ever saw it. It blooms because that's what it does. 

God notices. He doesn't miss a thing. 

And just as I gently lifted the magnolia flower between my fingers and lifted it to gaze full in its face, so He gently lifts my chin so that I can look in His face and notice that He is still there. 

Sticky tape and crumpled paper

Hello, Father God.

I've had a line from a song in my head for a day or two now. This has happened enough times now to alert me to two things:

1. You have something to say
2. You're getting my attention in a way that I can understand, since I am always humming something. 

So here it is. I got Phil Wickham's 'Cannons' CD for my birthday in September and I've been listening to it ever since. I like the music. Some bits are immediately accessible and other songs take a while to work their way into my head. This is from the song, 'True Love':

'Search your heart, you know you can't deny it
Lose your life, just so you can find it....'

Lose your life, just so you can find it.

I have definite tendencies towards Control Freakery. I realised this a couple of years ago, and I'd like to say that I am a recovering Control Freak, but I suspect that although I am taking baby steps I'm not that different yet.

My affliction manifests itself in many and varied ways; from my inability to refrain from screeching at my children when they stomp across the kitchen floor in muddy wellies, to locking horns with them when they always choose a different coat from the one I hold out to them. Soon we will be decorating the house for Christmas and this year I am determined to squash my need for the tree decorations to be symmetrical.

So, I like things how I like them. I know that other people have likes too, and I am sensitive to their likes. Mostly. I know, I know - God, I know that you're smirking. I am a work in progress, remember?

I like to know what's going on and I like to plan. I like lists. I like schedules and timetables and I am thrown when things are unpredictable and chaotic. So I'm constantly asking you 'What's next?' and 'what should I do?' and 'What's the Plan?'

I know that your timing is perfect and mine less so. I know that if I'd had things my way so many things  would have gone totally pear-shaped over the years. If you'd said yes indiscriminately to all my prayers I'd have married the wrong man, been in the wrong job, the wrong church (or none at all) in the wrong place and missed the amazing things that you had in store for me instead of the stuff that I longed for.  So I completely know that You Know Best.

How come, then, it's so difficult to slide across to the passenger side and let you drive? Even when I'm not driving, supposedly taking life as it comes and enjoying the ride, I find myself leaning over and pointing.

'I think that was our turnoff.'  

'Are you sure that we shouldn't have gone down there?'

'Could you speed up a bit, please?'

'I know you say that you know the way but I'm sure there's a more direct route than this...'

I like things my way. Don't we all? But I know that you know best. I find it so, so hard to surrender control.

'Lose your life, just so you can find it.'

I know that it's only when I take my hot little hands off my life and place it in your gentle, trustworthy ones that I can be completely me. If I'm constantly struggling to make something of my own design, it will fall apart. I need to surrender it up to you, Lord.

I don't much like the word, 'surrender'. To me it sounds like defeat; a white flag. I have lost. I am crushed.

But it occurred to me the other day that my little Katy, who's five, was struggling to make a boat for Scruffy Barney (her special, very-favourite toy and constant companion) out of paper and sticky tape. She was frustrated that the tape kept sticking to her instead of the scraps of paper and the thin strip that she'd cut out for the mast wouldn't stay upwards.

I offered to help. She refused.

I offered again, and this time I reached over her shoulder and tried to assist.  She knocked my hand out of the way with a growl. 'Mummy, NO. I want to do it.'

I backed away and sipped my coffee and watched. Her angry frustration turned into miserable frustration and she slumped in her chair. Woebegone, she looked at me with big eyes. Cradling the bedraggled bundle of paper and sticky tape in her hands, she held it out and said, mournfully,

'I don't think I can do it, Mummy. Will you make it work?'

I straightened out the little boat, added some sticky tape in the right places and splinted the mast with a drinking straw. Scruffy climbed in and I swear I saw him grin.

Katy was made up.

For about twenty minutes, and then she moved onto something else, and I think the boat still lies discarded under the table, but my point is: she wouldn't let me help, but I knew what to do. It was only when she surrendered the little boat that I could fix it for her.

You are my Daddy. You patiently wait and watch until I hand over my life. You are pleased with the bits that I give you, and you're hoping each day that I will surrender more until the whole thing is in your capable hands instead of my frustrated ones. You can do a little with the parts that I've handed over but the whole new creation won't be complete until you get all the components from me.

CS Lewis said this:

'The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because he made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be...It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.'

I know that when I give you a little, you give me back so much. So what would happen if I gave you everything, not holding anything back? My imagination is too small. I know in my head that it's the only way forward, the only way that I will become the person you want me to be, do the things that you want me to do, but it's so hard. The voice in my had refuses to surrender because it sounds too passive, too much like losing, and I don't want to be a loser. I am programmed by society to keep on trying, keep on keeping on, if at first I don't succeed, try, try again. I'll get there in the end; it's all down to me.

That's the way to make a paper boat that won't stand up. It isn't down to me at all.

'Lose your life, just so you can find it.'

Phil Wickham sings this line with such conviction and passion that it jumped out at me from the CD player. St Paul said it first, though.

'...instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life.'

Romans 6:13

You gave me my life because you wanted me to have it, and have it to the full. You want to change my little life for a big one. You don't want to wrestle control away from me just to make me miserable; you just want me to let you be in charge, because you love me too much to leave me the way I am. Your plans are bigger and better if I'd only let you drive. Your map reading is perfect, your speed is appropriate and the scenery on your route is more beautiful than the way I would have gone.

Help me to open my hands, Father God. Help me to stop clutching my life so tightly that my knuckles are white, thinking that I know best. That my plan is better than yours.

Help me to surrender myself, so that you can make me more like your self. Take the old life and transform it more and more into the new one you have for me.

I want to lose this life, with it's anxiety and confusion and frustration and find a new one, full of hope and peace and satisfaction.

It's just a mess of sticky tape and crumpled paper at the moment, Father. I'm not getting anywhere with this.

I don't think I can do it, Daddy. Please will you make it work?