“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
I woke today with gratitude for those who share me in their lives. I am thankful for those who are part of my journey.
I was thinking about hollyhocks today. I have some hazy memories of my home in Appalachia and hollyhocks. I remember they were everywhere, and each one was as beautiful as the next. I found a story titled Finding Beauty in the Flower Garden on the Blind Pig and the Acorn site and it touched my heart. For sure those who lived deep in the mountains had a harder life, but they had the beauty of the hollyhocks and each other.
I have so many memories of my grandmothers, aunts, and of course Granny walking me around their flower gardens.
I’ve always been drawn to flowers, likely because Granny loves them so much. As you might guess, I like the old fashioned sort of flowers like hollyhocks, zinnias, roses, lilies, and bachelor buttons.
I remember being in my Mamaw Marie’s flower garden and having a bumblebee land on my yellow sweater. The image has stayed in my mind all these years. I’ve often wondered if the mesmerizing color of the bee against the sweater is why I’ve never been afraid of bees.
Don Casada has often written about flowers that can be found at old homeplaces. Even though the folks are long since gone, as is any vestige of their homes, the flowers remain.
I know the people who lived deep in the mountains where life was harder than it is for me were surely cheered by the blooms in their yards just as Granny, my aunts, and me are.
Known by God
[Mary] turned toward him and cried out . . . “Rabboni!” John 20:16
READ John 20:11–18
After two brothers were separated by adoption, a DNA test helped to reunite them almost twenty years later. When Kieron texted Vincent, the man he believed was his brother, Vincent thought, Who is this stranger? When Kieron asked him what name he’d been given at birth, he immediately answered, “Tyler.” Then he knew they were brothers. He was recognized by his name!
Consider how a name plays a key role in the Easter story. As it unfolds, Mary Magdalene comes to Christ’s tomb, and she weeps when she finds His body missing. “Woman, why are you crying?” Jesus asks (John 20:15). She didn’t recognize Him, however, until He spoke her name: “Mary” (v. 16).
Hearing Him say it, she “cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (Which means ‘Teacher’)” (v. 16). Her reaction expresses the joy believers in Jesus feel on Easter morning, recognizing that our risen Christ conquered death for all, knowing each of us as His children. As He told Mary, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (v. 17).
In Georgia, two reunited brothers bonded by name, vowed to take “this relationship to the next level.” On Easter, we praise Jesus for already taking the utmost step to rise in sacrificial love for those He knows as His own. For you and me, indeed, He’s alive!
By Patricia Raybon
REFLECT & PRAY
How does it feel knowing that Jesus rose again and knows you by name? How can you know Him better?
Your knowledge of me is humbling, dear Jesus. Thank You for the sacrificial gift of Your knowing love.
SCRIPTURE INSIGHT
When Jesus called Mary’s name (John 20:16), He spoke to her in Aramaic, which was the native tongue of Jesus and the people of His day. In speaking to Mary, He addressed her as Miriam. Commentator William Hendriksen notes: “When Mary hears this word—her own name in her own language—spoken in that familiar way as only one person could ever pronounce it, she quickly turns away from the tomb and toward the speaker.” The term by which Mary addressed Jesus is Rabboni, which John interpreted for those less familiar with the Aramaic term (see 19:13, 17 where other Aramaic terms are explained). The term, akin to rabbi, means “my master” or “my teacher” and was one of respect, so honorable that it was given to just a few Jewish rabbis.
Arthur Jackson
Source: Our Daily Bread email
Anger is usually our attempt to take a vulnerable emotion and transform it into something a little tougher and more actionable. Things like fear, disappointment, sadness, rejection, and all those other icky, vulnerable emotions leave us feeling helpless. Anger, while being destructive, can make us feel empowered and powerful. This is especially true for men since we’re not really allowed to experience emotions apart from anger in any real way. I think we’re allowed to laugh at things and people, and we get to cry a little when our dog dies or something, but most of the rest is out of bounds. There’s always something under anger. If you can see what emotion you’re actually experiencing, life opens up in a whole new way.
~James Scott Henson
We're not Southern, we're Appalachian. We don't live on big farms. There's no big farms to be had. We have big mountains and skinny valleys and we perch our houses on one or in the other. We can't raise a lot of cattle, they don't thrive on the mountain sides. Us Appalachians and goats are about all that adapt well to these hills. We're strong. We adapt. We always have. If we can't work on these mountains, we'll just work under them. I don't know a lot of people that drink sweet tea around here. I know that equates with southern living. But we're not Southern, we're Appalachian.
We're not country, we're Appalachian. We don't have a lot of folks wearing cowboy hats. We're not cowboys. We wear mining hats or coal black dirty hair from a long day's work. Ball caps to replace the feel of a mining hat, or just to have something to hide under because we like to be tucked away, just like how these mountains wrap around us. Dirty hands, dirty faces, dirty clothes, but clean hearts. We may be out riding horses in old tennis shoes, dirty work boots, or heavy mining boots with toes made of steel, just like us. We're not rounding up cattle, we're blowing off steam. We get our heads right and our hearts close to God, spending the evening out brushing down an old horse. She's not a thoroughbred, she's therapy. We don't have a lot of fields to work. But we like to work the land we have. We get our hands dirty planting corn, beans, peas, potatoes, not enough to sustain an income, just enough to sustain our family. We like to prove we can do that. Sustain us. You know skin a buck, run a trot line, us Appalachian people really can survive. And we're not country, we're Appalachian.
We're not city folk, that's for sure, not even town folk. We're Appalachian. We're probably not current with the trends. Our men wear old work clothes for work, new work clothes to go into town. Depending on whether the coal black on their hands looks fresh or half-scrubbed away, we know which direction they're headed. But those dirty hands keep their babies in clean clothes. We may even head out to Lexington, Charleston, Johnson City, Asheville, land as foreign to our lives as countries across the oceans, to get some school clothes. And we will wear them to school, to play, and out in the gardens in the mud and dirt to help mommy and daddy hoe the corn. We don't have anything to prove. People outside of these mountains don't care about us. And people inside these mountains already know. Folks in the city would look at us with wide-eyed wonder, maybe amusement, maybe disgust. But we don't worry because we seldom need to go there, and they don't know how it would benefit their souls to come here. So our paths rarely cross. We're not city folk, we're Appalachian.
There's nothing wrong with southern folk, country folk, city folk. We see their worth, each group of them, and appreciate what they do. But we're not them. Some of us have been amongst them, and learned from them, and loved them. Traveling into their worlds on the working backs of the people in our world. Sent to learn, to broaden, to do better than the generation before us. Just like everywhere else, that's what we want for our children. But it is often that we learn that nothing is better than what we had. Hard work, big hearts, warm souls, level heads, wisdom, strength, perseverance, honesty, sincerity, love. They send us to know better, to do better. When we find out they knew better all along, we come home. We are our own. And to understand us is to love us. So just try to understand. We are Appalachian.
Source: Facebook/Greasy Creek Gal
Source: Facebook/Daily Dose of Happy
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