Iowa Hope.

The scene in Iowa backyards is a beautiful one. Trees cling to their last leaves, while fallen ones skip carelessly beneath the branches once their home. Every green, from the smallest ivy to the grand oak, consumes itself with red replacing green. Grasshoppers, boxelder bugs and lady bugs are my coffee date on this birch swing cloaked in moss. There’s a child’s fort, err, excuse me “castle” just across the trickle of water. Hills bring the horizon to sit close by and as the day yawns at eight am, the sun warms the earth enough to comfort us while we enjoy the breeze.

It’s Saturday morning of my small group’s weekend retreat in Middleofnowhere, IA. Being an Iowa native I can appreciate places like this better than some, I suppose. But this morning I’m caught off-guard by the silence. I mean ,it’s actually quiet here, other than the occasional car passing in front of the house, the laugh of a friend indoors and the creek of the swing beneath me. It hasn’t been quiet in a while.

I haven’t been quiet in a while.

Quiet is a funny thing. There’s something about it that makes us reflective, aware, sensitive. Something in quiet prods out thoughts of what is and reawakens our hopes of what might be.

Take the quiet scene before me, for instance. The trickle of a creek is remnant from the flood that raced here summer of 2008. The grass still lays low in marsh so that Tommy can’t get to his castle on the other side. The earth droops in weariness and farmers lift their caps to wipe the beads of brow, a harvest unredeemed understood. The corn that never grew, the rent never paid, the fair maidens unrescued. This is what is.

What might be is undetermined. And this is hope.

So in the silence of this morning I’m wondering. What is? In my today, in my spirit, what is? Where am I now? And what am I hopeful for? I guess hope is a funny thing, too. We use it a lot: false hope, hopeful, hopeless. What might tomorrow look like because of today? Do I imagine anything different? Do I imagine at all? That’s why I must know what is. Otherwise, how will I know to hope for anything else?