To consider the immensity of God’s creation and then…  

to see the small surprises, leaves me sometimes breathless…

I pull back a morning curtain, expecting gray dawn along a skyline, and instead! a dipper sending star beams to my joy-startled eyes (dawn is coming late now)…

I step outdoors in early grayness, expecting chill, and feel instead moist warmth of summer, teasing before its southward trip for winter…

and hear again a roaring: creek across the road re-swollen in this season normally dry…

Slow, I hike the farm hill, thinking fall has taken all the color worth consideration, 

… then spot the tiny treasure remnant, frail field flowers, bravely bearing their own tattered testimony to the God of great and small things…

Standing at the wood’s edge, silent, still, I see the movement: birds who’ve hushed their springtime noise, but flitting, landing here and there so close—flash of azure (a lingering bluebird!) and what are those, tinted subtle greenish-goldish? (ah! fall finches, already turned like leaves around them, autumn camouflaged)…  so near, so fear-free, I can almost touch them…

A glint of brightness catches me: gleaming gold in shadow, a tiny two-leafed treeling…

Back down the hill, I round the house and see again that surprise of pumpkins found beneath the vines gone rampant, wild-sown and “magic”-grown in compost heap—and think of slices of superlative tomato, come lately to the kitchen from that same spot, wild…

Inside, hours later, I hear work shoes on the stairway, see Husband in the doorway, bearing berry bucket, wearing boy grin: “I couldn’t just not pick ’em”—October raspberries, here up north, this late!…

I would never have expected…

And that’s just it.

None were miracles, just part of a normal season, only stretched a bit. I really hadn’t considered the possibilities…

God of infinite space and the tiny place, I sometimes box myself inside myself, assuming, assuming—and not considering the wild delightful possibilities.

Thanking the infinite God of the universe for 

~twinkling morning constellations, witness of His faithfulness

~stretched out time before the killing frost

~surprise of flower treasure

~feathered hangers-on in camouflage

~late garden wonders in the leaf heap, and on the autumn berry vine

~Himself, the God of possibilities of all sorts that I fail to imagine.

*****