What Fills a Place

Empty places do not fill themselves. Someone gives, and someone receives. Nothing that has gone empty fills itself back up by wanting to.

Two weeks ago the ground at the pond's edge was bare enough to walk on, dry enough that you could forget it had ever been lake bed at all. Then two hard rains came through, one after another, and the water rose six inches. The pond received what fell, as it always has, and for a few days, no dry ground remained to walk on. Water covered the whole basin again.

It was only for a little while. By the time I'm writing this, the water has already pulled back. The six inches did not hold. It rarely does. The edges have shown themselves again, a little at a time, and the fullness we just had is already looking like something temporary rather than permanent.

Near the edge, where the water used to stop, a stand of smartweed took root sometime during the dry weeks — small pink spikes of it, thick and unbothered, growing right where the lake bed had opened to the sun. It looked out of place when the pond was full, growing right out of the water, but now, with the pond receding, it looks at home again. It persists, water or not.

This week, a hundred feet from the water, the parish hall and the church filled up too. Vacation Bible School filled them with the energy of small children, with teenagers too — old enough now to have somewhere else to be, and here anyway, teaching songs they were taught, telling a story that was told to them. None of them invented what they were handing over. Every one of them received it first, from someone standing where they are standing now, and only afterward had anything to give.

By next week the building will fall quiet again.

That is not a failure of this week. Fullness was never going to stay. A pond does not refill itself, and it does not stay full once it's refilled. Hope does not restock itself in a single generation, and it does not stay planted in a child's life after one week of songs and snacks. Both require the same thing again and again: someone upstream willing to let go of what they were holding, and someone downstream with open enough hands to receive it.

I often hear a worry, in different words: will this hold?

Will what we're building in these small hearts survive past this week, past this year, past us?

I don't have an answer that settles that worry, because I don't think hope was ever a project we finish and secure. It rises and falls like the water in front of us. It has receded and refilled in every generation before this one, carried less by good management than by someone showing up with what little they had to give. Our job was never to guarantee the water stays high. Our job is to be faithful with the six inches we have today.

The smartweed doesn't know how long the water will stay, or when it will need to hold on through dry ground again. It grows where it stands, this week, in front of whatever is here. That's the whole of the assignment, for the plant and for us: not the twenty years, just today's six inches.

A Prayer

God who sends the rain that refills what has gone dry, knowing it will empty again, and raises up hands to pass on what they did not invent, knowing the room will grow quiet again too: thank you for fullness that does not last, because it means you keep giving it. Teach us to be faithful with the six inches we have today, not the twenty years we cannot see. Through Christ, who emptied himself once for all, and who fills us still. Amen.