As I sit here writing this column, I am thinking about all the craziness of COVID-19, safety action precautions, the economy, and the people in assisted living centers who are in total isolation. My mind can spend hours of wheel spinning on the horrific violence that seems to plague our country at this time. The negative energy is just stifling and, oh lest I forget, we are starting the campaign season that should add even more insanity to the mixture. I wonder what I can say to calm our minds and to bring us back to some level of normal, to a slight semblance of calm. 

This world that we live in today seems like it is changing faster than we can perceive it. Each day brings some terror or catastrophe that we never dreamed of the day before. Our leaders and lawmakers seem to flip-flop around from one day to the next to opposite ends of the spectrum at times. It is disheartening. 

And yet, as my fingers fly over the keys at a record breaking 10 words a minute I am listening to my neighbor cutting grass. I know when I am hearing that motor and those blades whirring that I am in the midst of summer. The smell of new mown grass is something that I have always loved. I know that in about a week he will be out doing the same thing again. I also know the feeling he will have when he finishes that lawn and sits down to a cold beverage and surveys his work each time he cuts his yard. Summer is the time of green growth. The gardens are just a few days away from a bountiful harvest and this summer should be a good one.

I see the pair of robins who have nested on my front porch flying endlessly from my lawn to the nest, providing a steady stream of worms for their young. I see balers and hay rakes behind monster tractors, and later huge bales of hay on tandem wagons swaying back and forth as they go by at a speed down the street. I see sweat-soaked farm workers in hats driving by my window nearing the end of their race to get in the hay before the weather changes. My cat is making the never-ending journey to attempt to get onto my computer, as I gently place her on the floor for the fourteenth time. 

The late afternoon sun has that golden haze that predicts one of this region’s most precious jewels, a beautiful sunset. And the cool of the night will bring the calls of the whippoorwill and the stars will twinkle on the dark blanket of the sky. The cattle at the neighbor’s farm will bawl with excitement of being fed and milked. 

The constants are still there. We need only listen to the earth. Creation is singing a song of abundance. This is the time of abundance. Soon we will have tomatoes, squash and sweet corn running out of our ears, and probably will not know what to do with them. 

Each day is a new beginning, a new opportunity made just for each one of us. And before all that, before any of this was even a thought; Christ was there. The world is full of constants, Christ is here, beside us. We need only to look and we will see him. The Lord is with you.

— Reflections appears regularly on the religion page. The column features a variety of local writers, coordinated through the Monroe Area Clergy Group. Lance Smith is pastor at Zwingli United Church of Christ in Monticello.