The Hedge

The hedge is beginning to bloom in our backyard. I am sure it has a fancy botanical name, but I just know it as hedge. To me, it is the scent of my hometown, the sweet perfume of a Southern springtime. I can’t get enough of that aroma,  I wish I could bottle it up and keep it all year. 

But hedge doesn’t last very long. After the first hard rain, the tiny pristine white blossoms turn brown and mat together. The scent evaporates and the plant dons basic green leaves until fall. The fragrant blooms are gone even more quickly than they came.

Too often we miss the fragrance of the hedge because we just think it will be there next year, or we are too busy or stressed to pause and enjoy it at all.

Right now the hedge is blooming, and right now my Zoe girl is alive. I want to savor every second that I can of this season, because I know it will be gone in a flash. Sometimes the hours can seem painful and long, but I want to soak up this time I have with my daughter. Five weeks have already passed in a blur since her diagnosis.

The last couple of weeks have been filled with a lot of waiting. The anguish of waiting for a phone call can be just excruciating. For the last two weeks, I woke up with knots in my stomach waiting for my phone to ring. Zoe’s diagnosis is perplexing. It actually makes me feel better that the doctors are a bit puzzled about it all as well. It is just one in a million (actually I think the odds work out to 1/3,000,000) that Zoe has this particular combination of conditions. We are thankful to God that Cody and I are not both genetic carriers of her conditions, as we once thought during the last couple of weeks.

Now that we know more, and in some ways actually understand less, I have some peace. The uncertainty of it all gives me renewed hope. Physicians can’t wrap their minds around all that is happening, they can’t explain it. 

And yet I know the One who DOES know and DOES understand and IS in control. I look to the cross and remember that he is for me and I am constantly reminded in Scripture and by his Spirit that he is with me. For and with. Two tiny words that communicate such truth about the beauty of the Gospel of Jesus. 

In an odd way, I think it really is a special blessing to be staring death in the face with her. Everything else in life has been quickly sorted into proper perspective. Zoe is teaching me to cherish each moment of life, because the next is not promised. And in all reality, none of us are guaranteed tomorrow. All too often, we carry on believing that we, and the ones we love, will live to a ripe old age on this earth. It is just not promised to any of us, no matter how young or old. 

And yet this life is only the beginning. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once preached these words about life on earth, “All that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up.” Zoe’s prologue may be short, but the story into which she will live when the curtain rises will have no end.

All flesh is grass,

   and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades

    when the breath of the Lord blows on it;

    surely the people are grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

    but the word of our God will stand forever.

(Isaiah 40:6b-8)