Sleeping Dragons

"When the dragon awoke, trouble flared again.

He rippled down the rock, writhing with anger 

when he saw the footprints of the prowler who had stolen

too close to his dreaming head. 

So may a man not marked by fate

easily escape exile and woe

by the grace of God." 

-from Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf

The shrieking brakes of the car behind you bring your heart into your throat, as you grip your wheel and wait for the impact on your bumper. But it doesn’t come. The driver behind you looked up, saw your car stopped at the light, and managed to slam on his brakes in time. Your breath comes out in a tight sigh and your prayers of thanks fly to heaven as the light turns green and you drive on. Ten minutes later you’ve almost forgotten the incident, and forgotten that moment of fervent thanks breathed out to a sovereign God. When we see or feel a danger averted our thanks are genuine and profuse. But what of the rest of our lives, as we breathe and move in a world filled with dangers?

How many times have we tread past the “sleeping dragon” and only the grace of God has kept us?

I was breezing through portions of Beowulf this afternoon and those lines stopped me. The runaway slave that slipped into the dragon’s lair (little guessing, it seems, that a live dragon lurked still within) and carried the cup back to gain his master’s favor… that man hardly guessed how close he had come a fiery demise. But as the ancient author points out, how often do we walk glibly by dangers of our own?

Living every day as we do, it’s so easy to forget that it is a miracle we wake up at all. I’m not trying to scare anyone here, or make you paranoid about getting out of bed, but am only pointing out the reminder I got from an Old English poem today.

Don’t forget to thank God for protecting you, even through the dangers you never knew lurked nearby. And be glad your danger isn’t a sleeping dragon.

(An Andrew Mayer illustration of Beowulf facing down the dragon.)

Broken Thorns

There were no thorns in the perfect world. At first God made all things without prickles or nettles or spines. And then came the day when everything changed. Everything. Even the ground and plants. Mankind broke the world, and then came the thorns.

I live in the desert. Cactuses and rocks and dust are the most plentiful things when you walk outside. But don’t take that as a complaint. I love my home state of New Mexico, and there is a distinct and unique beauty to my land that I have yet to find anywhere else. But there is no denying it is usually a rather hard, dusty, incredibly dry place, where every plant has to struggle to survive. And yet, this is spring. Even here in the desert, spring is here. Let me share just a few photos of what I found when I went hiking today.

A delicate bloom grows and lives in the very midst of the curse of thorns. And not just once. Again and again, different flowers, different thorns, different places… The entire hike the beauty of the truth came home to me. Jesus ended winter, ushered in spring, and dealt the curse its death blow when He rose from the grave. The curse is broken. Jesus rose, death itself is dying, day by day. Thorns still infest the ground. But signs of spring, rebirth, and the loosening of Satan’s hold, grow up in the middle of it.

When the stone rolled away it meant more than just the Christians' reclamation and reconciliation with God. That triumphant step of Jesus, walking from the tomb into the light of the newly rise sun; it permeated every corner of the universe. Every distant star, each leaf on your tree outside, every hair on your head, the unseen soul in every human, the triumphant light of Easter has hit it.

The risen Christ makes a difference. Hope is not only promised now. It is secured and absolute. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. The curse will be fully eradicated. And the God who rose watches us today, every thought, word, and deed is under His living eye, as He pleads for us before His Father.

The thorns grow. But sometimes, God allows even the thorns to be beautiful. In the midst of the curse, beauty dwells; smiling, triumphant, just waiting. The world broke. The cure came and rose. The final triumph is on its way. We dwell in a world of hope.