Tend and Keep

Today, I looked outside and saw a sparrow perched in its dignified little way on the leafy branch of a river birch that I had planted in the marshy, wetland soil of our pasture a few years ago. And the feeling that sprung up inside me I can only describe as this: Shalom. The peace of the delicate bird finding rest, the health, the thriving of the tree, planted in just the right spot, the wholeness of the cyclical pattern of well-being, the rightness, and beauty, and harmony on display, the pride that I was somehow part of it all; bringing healing instead of destruction, restoration instead of ruin, a glimpse of flourishing, of how things should be: Shalom.

Sometime in the 1990s, I was in grade school and was volunteering with my mom to help serve the food at a benefit concert. There was rain, so we were lugging boxes and coolers and coffee makers into a backup location, a recreation center in the neighboring town. As we walked through the doors, both my mom and I stopped short at what we saw: men, grown men , playing basketball, in the middle of the day. I stood there, gaping, until my mom whispered at me to stop staring and keep moving. Looking back, now I know that these men were almost certainly white-collar workers who met to play sports over their lunch breaks, and there's really nothing too unusual about that, but the concept of this was so foreign to my life at the time that I could not make sense of what I was seeing. In my world, working men were sweaty, hungry, and tired at lunchtime, and they were happy to get a break to sit down and eat. After lunch, they might stretch out and take a "10-minute snooze," as my da...