Higgedly Piggedly - Perfectly Orderly!

It’s a dream: a shady wood, lit by the speckled sunlight breaking through the stooping, crooked, branches above our heads; bluebells, queens of the wood, dressed in royal purple, bow their gracious heads, whilst golden-yellow celandines and pearls of pure-white sorrel and wood anemones provide a rich carpet between  the windy paths that follow uneven contours of hump and hollow; and here’s a broken bough and there an aging tree lies fallen, angled, rested, refuge to a myriad of tiny creeping creatures; a trickling stream wends restfully upon its well-scoured furrowed bed while birches show off their silvery bark; each tree has a character of its own; horse chestnuts’ crumpled fresh-green emerald leaves stretch forth and aspiring larches reach towards the sky.  A delightful world: God’s world.

The park, the formal garden, planted in rows, straight as a dye – not God’s way! Our streets are straight or follow the uniform curve of a surveyors’ plan. Not God!

This wood, a wonderfully disordered, chaotic, full of surprises, masterpiece but underneath I perceive a perfect order, a cycle of life and decay with nothing wasted, coordinated – pure genius.

I soak all this in on this bright sunlit May afternoon. Meanwhile, a wealth of birdsong, un-orchestrated, fills the air whilst silently and stealthily, a tree creeper busily creeps up, around, the trunk of a nearby tree.

 We humans want to organised, to control; it can be good. But let’s not forget God’s ‘way’, the disorderly, orderly. Let life break out, break out from underneath, from all around; let’s leave room for inspiration, for God’s new things; let’s take direction from the unlikely and be a grass-roots church and live  - expecting God’s surprises!