Groaning In Hope

It is evenings like the one I sit in now, writing to you, that dare my arms to try and wrap themselves around the ever aging, ever growing treetrunk of my faith. It is evenings like this that make me look like a five year old hugging an oak tree centuries times his age. It is evenings like this one now that make me look so small compared to something so big. The spring song of many birds bleeds through the frames of my open windows. The presense of these gentle, yet magnificant creations, are not met by eye, but instead enchanted by my ears. I cannot see them, but oh how I hear them. Their song is more complex than I will ever know; I only recognize that it is a desperate groan concieved from the fracture on creation caused by the fall before time had finished its first sentence. And this evening, fading rapidly into night, is in fact, fractured. I know this because I can hear it. The creeking of every tree branch that bends and breaks at the slightest breeze, the rustle of the junebug tightroping the vine outside my window, the song of the bird now replaced by the great chorus of crickets, the squirrel franticly searching for a nut to fill his belly, the stars finally able to start their show because the sun had to go wake up the rest of the world, they are all groaning, they are all hoping. They hope for the fufillment of that fracture, for the redeeming rescue of the one that gave them life. You see, that spring song of those birds, it is a deep groaping for the return. Those birds out there, that junebug, that squirrel, those trees towering ove my driveway and the pavement of Orchard Lane, those delicate stars, and that sleeping sun are waiting with eager anticipation for freedom from its worldy decay. They are wailing out. Adam's fall didn't only fracture us, it got them too.
They are waiting for future glory. Romans 8:22 tells us that "the whole of creation has been groaning with the pains of childbirth until now." And everyday that passes without that return, without that sweet escape, without that glorious prisonbreak, their groans grow deeper and more agonizing. The baby goes unborn; It remains trapped in the womb. And in the growing pains of childbirth, the hope for that baby's birthday grows too. To know that one day the baby will come and the pain will pass helps creation carry on; it helps them grow in hope. Their is a promise that one day the glory of creation will be fufilled, that one day the canyon left in the hearts of all things will once again be full. Until then we must groan, we must groan in hope, we must groan in Him.