Love Grows Green, J.J.Cozzens

DEAR HUSBAND,

Grace looks different in the winter season… like cold snow that first falls lightly and then melts into the pores, washing the world clean, bunching up in heaps at our feet. There is an art to pressing forward in this silver rain—ginger steps on its soft surface; white yielding under our soles. The hurried, screeching wheels of busyness spin wild on the topsoil of grace, flinging it messily and disturbing its peaceful descent. Grace must be tread lightly; a white mystery that feeds the parched earth, a mystery that finds the tired grooves of our thirsty souls…

It’s harder to catch grace in winter, when the straggly tree limbs are without their cupping leaves. The soul’s surface area seems smaller; Grace too easily slips through the bare branch-like fingers…

How do we drink it back upward when our limbs don’t catch it and it falls uneven at our feet? It’s easier to trip over graces bundled heaps or let our shoes scuff it to the side than it is to embody grace…

Feeling the coldness of grace this morning – like the fresh air that hits wet skin before the sun dries us warm. It’s the order of grace—shocking, then warming. My branches failed to catch its incoming this morning… failed to bear needed fruit—a fruit that would have nourished your soul and mine.

But for the rest of today, I will bask in the silver sheen of grace. I will let it melt into my soul and extend to yours. I will let it swirl wild about me and remember what it was like to be three and open my mouth wide, waiting for its falling.

I will let the fingers of grace reach out to your face on mornings when quietness is easier. I will let the childlike playfulness of grace jump into the leaf-like buildup of grace at my feet—beautiful chaos. Freely received, freely given. I will let my pores seep in the grace that lands on the heart-skin of our life – A warming welcome to this still unfamiliar friend.

Praying for new leaves to spring wild on our branches, cups facing upward, hanging on tightly in these heavy snowfalls of grace. Snow makes our rhythm slower—a world all grey with quiet, stilled by the silver. Quiet enough to hear the leaves growing…

I’m sorry grace wasn’t what greeted you this morning, Husband… the grooves aren’t deep yet, but this marriage will grow good things… sturdy reservoirs for grace. Leaf cups that overflow (ps. 23:5). We will be “like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do.” (Ps. 1:3)

DEAR HUSBAND,

Pain thins us, bony fingers pressing into flesh and gripping onto the bone marrow, that which is deepest in us. We arch our back, it digs deeper to latch onto hardened pockets… the well-weathered places, dense and hallowed.

Grace always surges when pain thins, smoothing jagged edges as they catch, spreading honey-balm over puncture wounds. Holes that leak in light, stars on skin. Grace wanting to be a companion long after pain removes its talons — embedded beneath surface flesh, wrapped around the life marrow.

Feeling myself puff up as pain’s perforated edges near, fighting the urge to swell with infection and drive this grace-rimmed intruder out. Slap the anemic, sunken face and refuse to see grace pulsing blue in its veins. Oh, pride. How natural you come to this flesh-life… scorning grace when it spreads its wide arms and hangs helpless on stick-beams. Pain reminds us of the invitation to climb up on these same wooden pieces and die daily to self. To the ballooned, puss-inflated self that bellows loud when pain punctures its proud, kept exterior. A cross with ragged splinters, far from the polished silver that hangs round the rims of our neck. A grace that knows from the bottom dirty curve of our soul that there is always good offered at the table God invites us to… a feast that nourishes if we let it. Mouth wide open for grace… not wide open with thunderous dissents, forgetting to eat and be filled.

All this to say, my love, I see grace scooting in .. edging and creeping in slowly in this pained helplessness. And I see you, so ready to serve and to feed the hungry places of my grace-starved self. Thank you… for this. For love, for grace, for the christ-like way that you serve me.

DEAR HUSBAND,

The gray expanse wraps tight around the world, a film of colors dim and muted. A gray sheet cloaking the golden reach of the sun-orb. Flower faces stretch thin looking for light, backs arched to find the yellow-gold warmth that spills colors across petal-skin.

Growth is always a life-cluster of tiny things crowded, pressed together. Color pigments jumbled together, reflecting the sun. A thousand little minutes of growth packed into the life forms that decorate the earth. Atom bubbles that have traversed the blue earth, hold our dusty frame together.

Days feel longer with a shrouded sun, its gray garment hanging low and heavy. The soul has to stretch further to find liquid daylight, something to grow by. But the colored pigments scurry beneath the surface, greening our inner world. Tiny moments cluster together to give our life shape, color. Forehead kisses, bedtime prayers, morning office, whispered things.

The Gravity that pulls me into you pulls the colored molecules together under the gray sky. The earth groans ready, ready for the sun to pluck away the dulled silver sheet. Ready for pink to blush our cheeks, cotton-candy buds to push out from treetops. Ready for pigments to crowd and paint the world again with wild, spring-time joy.

Thanks for learning how to seek liquid daylight with me under the winter sky. For springtime kisses when the world shivers with barren cold. For the thousand atom-moments that form us. Most of all, for painting my world with color…

Big as the blue sky.

Big as the gray sky waiting for our paintbrush.