For Wilshire Baptist Church
The spider lilies are blooming. It’s the first day of fall and we’re having a late, near-record heat wave, and yet the spider lilies have come up in the yard as they do each fall with their red spidery blooms atop their thin, light green stems. They’re confirmation that change is coming. Cooler weather will be on our doorstep soon.
When I was younger, I looked for signs of fall in other places, but they don’t seem as reliable as they once were. In my memory it was always cooler when school started, but the high schoolers who walk through our neighborhood to school have had to endure temperatures near 100. Football is the ultimate fall sport, and yet last weekend we almost burst into flame under a blazing midday sun as we watched our team. But the spider lilies? They’re the real deal; they know what’s going on.
The spider lilies were here before us, planted by someone who owned our lot 20 years ago or maybe 100. We first saw them after we moved in a decade ago. They sprang up in what now is the lawn in the backyard and along a brick perimeter wall near the alley that predates us as well. The first year we saw the lilies out in the lawn, I had to protect them with a broken flowerpot so I wouldn’t accidentally mow them down before they finished their fall showing. But LeAnn had a better idea: she carefully dug up the lilies in the middle of the lawn and transplanted them where they would be safe and would provide fall color where there wasn’t any. And that’s what they do: they provide color, but they also signal that fall is really coming after all.
More than that, the spider lilies remind us that the eternal cycles of nature are still in motion; God is still active in creation. And where God is active, there is hope.