Happy Sunday.

Patterns in the ice of shallow pools always catches my eye. I think they are formed by repeated melting and re-freezing, or perhaps by water that moves just slightly while freezing. Certainly there is some mixture of air and water caught in these interesting swirls. It always looks to me like someone has been writing there in the ice in some unknown script. I think of Palmer Method Penmanship…the elegant flowing hand of my grandparents…ink driven to words and sentences by the motions of the large muscles, so the thoughts flow across the pape.

Canon SX20IS. 1) and 2) 130mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 80. 3) 95mm equivalent, f4 @ 1/250th @ ISO 80. Landscape Mode.

Processed for intensity and clarity and cropped for focus in Lightroom.

Being Sunday: I see words in the ice, but then I am a very wordy person. I see words. I can remember as far back as my early teens, catching sight of an interesting word somewhere my environment…on a sign, on a cereal box on the counter in the kitchen, on the soup can I just threw in the trash…in a book a seatmate on the bus was reading…and having it register in my mind so vividly that I felt compelled to go back over my movements and the scene around me to find where it was printed. This still happens to me 60 years later (only now they are airplane seatmates not buses). It happened yesterday, while out shopping.

You might say it happened when I saw the patterns in the ice…only there…the word being written is just off the tip of my tongue…just beyond thought. Words, the fact that we have language, makes us, in a very real sense, who we are. Because we not only see the world around us, but name it, we can change that world, for good or bad, in ways other creatures can not. Language is power. Words have power, but they are power as well. We recognize this on the deepest level.

God, in Jesus, is described as the living word. Like the words written the ice, God is a word always just off the tip of our tongues…just beyond thought. We recognize that something of great importance and beauty is written, being written, and we reach for the meaning, without ever quite getting there. That too defines us.

In a very real sense it is enough to know, to recognize, that truth and beauty are written, in the ice, or in a living person, even if we can’t quite read it. And, if you believe the promise, they are written in our long lost native tongue…and one day we will catch the thought.