It’s my dad’s birthday today. He was on holiday with Mum recently and had a bit of a funny turn, which involved a night in hospital before they came home. He’s been better since they got back, after a little rest and relaxation. Holidays are exhausting.
Actually, it sometimes feels like everything is exhausting and at this time of year everything and everyone is exhausted.
I was in the garden this weekend. My garden is just a paved yard with pots and bamboo but I love it. Some of the plants are very old but somehow I’d rather see if they can be coaxed back into leaf and flower than replace them with something new.
Anyway, there were two reasons for venturing out. First, there is a lot of leafy debris lying around, which needs sweeping up. How a couple of dozen pots and some troughs of bamboo can possibly work hard enough to produce that amount of stuff every year is beyond me.
The second was that I noticed that although the roses look great (savage pruning a few weeks ago now paying off in strong growth) the rest of the plants just seem really, really tired. Basically, they look like I feel: knackered, especially the bamboo.
Of course they do. It’s not rocket science: they live in a confined space; they work hard; and their food supply is limited. Good grief. They really are like me.
Now at this time of year, as Christians tell again the story of how Jesus rose from the dead at Easter, we tend to fixate somewhat on new life.
Fair enough, but one of the striking things that the Bible says about God is that she’s not just about new life. It’s not all eggs and bunnies. He’s about making this one better, not just at Easter but all the time. ‘I will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint’, he says to the prophet Jeremiah, and those are words I need to hear pretty well every day.
I reckon most of us do, and not just so we don’t end up dry and brittle like my knackered bamboo but so we can look forward to being fed and watered and refreshed. Because spring isn’t just for the baby lambs. It’s for all us old sheep too. Happy birthday, Dad.
That’s the actual bamboo, right there.