I didn’t know whether these irises would bloom before we moved house, so I was delighted to be greeted by these lovely faces today.
As I may have mentioned before, I suffer from an exaggerated sense of personal responsibility for the problems of the people around me and of the world in general. I tend to feel like I ought to try and solve the aforesaid problems, underlying which, I suspect, is an unrealistic belief in what I might be capable of doing about them. The other weekend, I came across the poem Thee, God, I come from, to Thee go by Gerard Manley Hopkins and spent some time meditating on the first few verses:
THEE, God, I come from, to thee go ,
All day long I like fountain flow
From thy hand out, swayed about
Mote-like in thy mighty glow.
In my imagination I saw a large shaft of orange-golden light illuminating innumerable specks of dust, which were moving around randomly, shining brightly as they caught the light. I saw myself as a one of those specks, bathed in the warming love of God. A tiny thing with no influence, no power, no purpose, just moving round in a seemingly meaningless fashion. Strangely enough, I found this hugely consoling – as such a speck, I am not responsible for everyone else’s problems, I cannot influence the fate of the world, my actions are largely insignificant. At the same time, the speck that was me did keep catching the light, did keep reflecting God’s glory back into the world.
Of course I have responsibilities, I have things I want to do, hopes and desires – but this image puts them into proportion in a way that frees me from that exaggerated sense of my own responsibility and importance. It speaks to me of living life with greater freedom, dare I say even joy, seeking to reflect the light of God into the world without any fear of being judged for not having sufficiently ‘done my bit’ to make the world a better place. Makes me think of Galatians 5:1 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.