Hard Red Flowers

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. – Galatians 5:22-23

I get joy when I think about what He’s done for me – from “I Get Joy”, and others – Al Green and others

Whatever brings me the most joy will prove irresistible. That’s just the way we are built. We were designed to enjoy joy. When nothing brings me joy, I experience despair. When something brings me joy, I go after it. – Larry Crabb

One of the things I like about my house is the garage. It’s a three-car setup with a high ceiling. The garage doors have a manual release with a cord attached. The cord ends in a little red plastic cylinder with serrations that make it easy to grasp. I don’t use it much, but it clicks over the tops of our relatively tall vehicles as we pull in. Otherwise, I don’t pay it much mind. But hummingbirds notice.

If the big door of the garage is up for any length of time in the summer, one or more of the hummingbirds that frequent our rose-of-sharon shrubs and other big-bloomed plants will zip into the bay to check out something so red and promising as that little dangling plastic cylinder. They hover, then with a chirp of their blurred wings, zip out. Given all the global positioning stuff they have to keep track in their tiny heads, I doubt that hummingbirds have much room for internal dialog and speculation. If they had the capacity, they would probably hold seminars around the roses to discuss the Hard Red Flower. In hummingbird theology, the little plastic knob in Mushroom’s garage would probably represent Satan-as-an-angel-of-light.

Over the weekend, one bird found itself in hummingbird Gehenna. When the doors are up, there is close to three feet of clearance between the door and the ceiling. The bird with the problem was lured in by the Hard Red Flower, and then, for some reason, instead of zipping out, it zipped up. It found a roost of rest amid the tangle of spokes on the bicycles suspended from the ceiling mounts. Though it had physical rest and safety, it had no peace. It was confused and frustrated in its attempts to find a way out of the big trap. Try as I might, I was unable to communicate to the little creature that the only way out was down. There is, perhaps, a lesson in that as well. It insisted on flying above the doors, trying futilely to escape through the top of my house only to bump into resistant clouds of sealed and white-painted drywall. I tried to get the bird out for a good part of Saturday afternoon. I even tried after dark, thinking that it might seek the light rather than the darker cavern above the doors. No good. Sunday morning, the bird was still alternating escape attempts with increasing rest periods on the spokes. I was a little worried. I left the doors up and went on about my business. In a little while I returned and could see my intruder no more. I even checked the floor, in case he or she had fallen from hunger and exhaustion. The cats were lounging in dark spots around the yard, presenting no immediate threat of consumption, but the feathery hover-round was not to be found. It had made its escape.

It may be that, in probably desperate hunger, the bird had once more checked the Hard Red Flower – just in case. Doing so would have put it below the doors. The cool morning breeze was blowing in, and the hummingbird zipped out as it should have done the day before.

Hummingbirds are built to live on nectar. Humans are built to live on joy. I will admit to having been rather baffled by the verse that says, “The joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). When the exiles returned to Jerusalem and heard the words of the Law read by Ezra and interpreted and explained by the Levites, they were convicted and stricken. They began to weep. But it was not a day of weeping over the past, it was a day “holy to the LORD”, a day of rejoicing in their restoration.

Even the truth can be a Hard Red Flower.

It springs upon many of us who are in some sense “religious” people. It’s a trap we usually don’t imagine we will need to avoid. There are religions of despair that preach a truth but reject joy. And if our souls have a certain bent, we find such melancholy fits us as if it were tailor-made.

Our journey here, no matter how difficult or fraught with trials, is meant to be a joyous one. Jesus said He came to give us not just life but life in extravagant and joyous abundance. He endured suffering “for the joy that was set before Him”. His true disciples are always witnesses to joy, whether in the blood and horror of the Coliseum, the torture of a atheist regime’s prison, or in the anguish and loss of an unemployment line or a hospital room. Joy is not happiness.

The other danger -- more like the one the hummingbird faced, is a decoy joy. The quote above from Larry Crabb came in the context of chocolate silk pie. We can mistake something that soothes us or makes us feel good for a source of joy.

The funny thing about joy is that it often comes in a shell. Sometimes false joy is like the plastic knob that fooled the bird; it is the same all the way through. There is no kernel to it. Real joy, conversely, will often have a skin or a shell that hides the good stuff on the inside. The shell may be beautiful and welcoming like rose petals. Or, it may be tough, hard, and resistant like a walnut hull. For example, there is a kind of joy that is at the heart of death. The outside repels us, but there is sweetness in the center.

Perhaps there is a little death, or a temporary death in all joy, and we are able to experience joy only as we die a little to one thing or another, for joy – like death, is a kind of release.