The Grandaddy Letters - Volume III

Rain Lilies

It’s a boy! (read at this post's original home - "The Life-Charged Life") I guess if there’s anything that has a charge of life about it… it’s the promise held in a brand-new child. Yesterday, many, many miles to the north, Naomi and Craig discovered that our 18-weeks and counting grandchild is a boy.

Not, “It’s going to be a boy,” but, “The baby is a boy.”

He’s actually cute, so far as sonogram portraits go. His heartbeat is strong and everything looks on track in all the right ways.

And he’s moving around. “Turning somersaults”, Naomi said. Our grandchild is an amazing personification of the life-force that animates the universe and that is so hard for us to pin down to describe.

There is something insistent and persistent about life; it’s a tenacious impulse that screams purpose and redemption and promise. Some of my favorite words.

We have some flowers in our garden we call “rain lilies”. Most of the time they can’t even be seen. In fact this year we hadn’t found any evidence at all and thought they were gone for good. Then, just a few days ago, we got two good rains in 24 hours.

• Monday we noticed a little brownish-green poking through the dirt.
• Tuesday the stems were a good four inches tall.
• Wednesday – and all over the yard, not just one area – clumps of stems stood up like stiff, ten-inch bristles.
• Thursday around breakfast they all got the signal and bloomed in perfect unison.
• This morning it’s like a flower-bomb went off in the garden!

We have around five main concentrations of fresh vibrant color, with hundreds and possibly thousands of exquisite lilies – crowded together – splashing vitality and promise and life in a triumphant, giddy display of unbounded belief!

Some days I wake up so expectant that I just can’t wait to see what will burst on to the scene next!

- DEREK