We stress and fret and plan and pray – and a leaf falls, tenderly, swirling back and forth on the late summer breeze, suspended, briefly, out-of-time, to begin its up and swaying journey down to the ground. It rests near a pebble, smoothed and polished by some water flow which no longer courses this way. The pebble, so kind to my fingertips, pleasurable, honed and buffed—not the product of days or minutes, but of aeon. This pebble was larger, sharper in Jesus’ day; larger and sharper still in Moses’. Yet it was still a pebble even then. About the time that Adam’s children walked, east of Eden—or was it before? -- this pebble in its shiny sharpness slid off the rock cliff face, tumbled down the embankment and landed in its first pool, where the rubbing began. But see— Look at the ribbons of color permeating the pebble’s being: black and white with onyx and crystal, layer upon layer, some thick, some not. Each color an aeon, a Day,...
jesus family life.