Cross Country in the Rain
November 25, 2024 by Cynthia Ruchti
Filed under Daily Devotions, Personal Growth
By Cynthia Ruchti
Rain? More sleet than rain.
As I drove with the heat cranked up as high as it would go and the vents blowing on my feet and face at the same time, huddled over the steering wheel as if it were a glowing log in the fireplace, I noticed a handful of young people in shorts and t-shirts running along the side of the road. On this ugliest day in the history of ugly, the high school’s cross country team members showed up for practice and ran…in the sleet.
Behind the handful of runners came another bunch, and another. While I bent over my steering wheel in the comfort of my vehicle, they leaned into the wind and rain, their legs pumping, arms slick with the precipitation that coated the sidewalks and roadway. One foot in front of the other. Silent. Focused. Plodding forward despite the Terrible, No Good, and Awful Day.
WINDOW WITH A VIEW
November 20, 2024 by Cynthia Ruchti
Filed under Daily Devotions, Humorous
By Cynthia Ruchti
Just beyond our bathroom window, Adam and Eve Barnswallow built a nest on top of a wooden shutter. As the season progressed, we watched the parents tend the nest and warm their eggs. Eventually little fluff-heads attached to massive, always-open beaks peeked over the edge of the nest.
When my then five-year-old granddaughter Grace was at our house one day, I took her by the hand to show her the incredible sight. Six now-adolescent barn swallow babies were crammed into a tiny mud-and-fiber nest. Grace took such delight in watching the mom fly back and forth with nubbins of insects for her children. We mocked their bird voices as we watched the beaks open and close.
So Not My Gift
October 28, 2024 by Cynthia Ruchti
Filed under Daily Devotions, Worship
By Cynthia Ruchti
I caught myself saying it again the other day as I cleaned up the church kitchen after helping to serve snacks during fellowship time following the worship service.
Choosing how much to purchase and prepare for an unknown number of congregants is “sooooo not my gift.”
The family of a newborn is counting on me to provide their supper on Wednesday night. Me? I can cook. It’s not that. I actually cook pretty well. But I feel so much more comfortable writing a clever little poem for a baby shower than I do providing a meal. I told the deaconess in charge of scheduling meals for situations like this, “I found it funny, considering my crazy life this week. Rather than saying yes, I should have requested meals for ME!”
Who Decided?
October 18, 2024 by Cynthia Ruchti
Filed under Daily Devotions, Humorous
Who decided wrinkles are unattractive and to be avoided at all costs? What if we’re thinking backward on this issue?
Where is it written that a baby’s skin is the ideal? What if the skin of a baby is really under-done and the ideal is a mature-looking face? What if we looked at a baby’s soft, flawless complexion and thought, “Oh, that’s too bad. Well, give it time.”
Premature Season Change
October 2, 2022 by Cynthia Ruchti
Filed under Daily Devotions
By Cynthia Ruchti –
As I write this, I’m surrounded by the wonder of a warm autumn day, one that smells like toasted summer. The autumn light spotlights the bright colors of the autumn trees and autumn-crisped grasses, perfuming the autumn air with that mellow, smooth, ripe fragrance of cottonwood at its peak and rusty pine needles, of apples begging for picking and tomato plants giving up their last fruits of harvest.
By the time you read this, few places this far north will have leaves on the trees. The staccato dance of color and rustle will have given way to the rattle of bare boned branches against one another, brown against a gray November sky.
Autumn seems too short of a season, most years. And sometimes that’s my fault. I cheat it of its shelf life, because I know what’s coming–winter.
Winter–not my favorite time of year, living in this land of ice and cold, snow and blizzards, closed roads and colorlessness; unless you count white as a color.
Winter–the season that seems endless, its days short and bone-chilling.
Autumn, on the other hand, calls for sweatshirts and long hikes through the opening woods, for s’mores over the campfire and quilt cocoons, great sleeping weather with the windows open and the down comforters piled high, pumpkins and earthtone decorations and Thanksgiving and putting up the garden’s produce.
But I hesitate in autumn, never taking a full breath, because I know what the season right behind it will demand.
A cancer patient in remission might fail to take a full breath, knowing she’ll have another biopsy six months or a year from now. A parent of a pre-teen might miss some of the beauty because of a premature, imagined chill still years distant. A marriage might suffer from a similar syndrome: “We made it through that crisis, but there’s bound to be another one ahead”.
When God said through Solomon that there was a season for everything (Ecclesiastes 3), I wonder if He also was telling us not to cheat the season we’re in. To plan for, but not pre-live, the crises of the next or opposite season.
“Don’t you be talking when it’s the season to be silent,” He might rephrase that instruction. “Don’t feel loss when it’s the season of gain. Don’t pre-worry about a season of death and miss the season of living.”
PRAYER: Father God, why should thoughts of an icy wind trouble me on a day like today when the sun is blindingly bright against the yellow leaves, the breeze merely cool, not cold? So fill my sense with this present moment that I don’t miss Your Presence in it!
“There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 CEB).
