It's now a good number of weeks since we had rain in Aberdeenshire. The grass has lost much of its green, the soil is dusty and the humans are trying to get used to temperatures in constant double figures and with days when it reached 28 degrees!
I know! Anything around 20 degrees is moderate, temperate and pleasant. But for a couple of months leading into Spring the temperatures weren't often in double figures, and it was also a relatively dry winter.
Water conservation, hose-pipe bans and watering the garden with dishwater and not a hose, doesn't happen often in Aberdeenshire.
Despite the lack of rain, the climate has brought out the roses, some of them astonishingly beautiful. As a short break in the dry spell we had a couple of days of what can only be called smizzle; it wasn't heavy enough to be drizzle and it was more than haar. But it was wet, gently and soothingly wet; and it refreshed the roses.
This photo in the early morning hardly does justice to the complex beauty of petals, colours, water, light and stillness. And it reminded me of words from the Bible where often the dew or the soft rain is a metaphor for the refreshment of the human spirit. The words from Deuteronomy 32.2 speak for a rich symbol of God's presence restoring vitality, bathing with life.
" Let my teaching fall like rain
and my words descend like dew,
like showers on new grass,
like abundant rain on tender plants."
Health, fulfilment, vitality, hopefulness – hearing and heeding and doing the words and works of God are part of the relationship between the God of life and the life we live. The photo was, for me, a lovely reminder not only of what side my bread is buttered on, but who it is that is the bread of life itself.
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