olive leaves

A good friend of mine, a soldier I served with, often said, “Don’t wish your life away.” He said this whenever someone wanted it to be tomorrow, or just couldn’t wait for Christmas, or was really ready for spring. Often that person was me. 

I can be that way because sometimes the day I’m living doesn’t seem very exciting. Often it seems bleak. At any rate, it doesn’t look nearly as good as, say, my upcoming vacation. 

This morning I read about Noah, the man who endured decades of mockery as he built the ark, and then floated inside it through the destruction of the world. Floated inside it, he and his family and the last vestiges of life on the entire planet. For forty days, rocking and pitching with the waves, no control over direction, no idea what was coming next. 

God was there, though, and after weeks afloat he gave Noah the promise of an olive leaf. 

Genesis 8:6-12 says, “After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.” 

A chapter or two later God gives the promise that he’ll never again destroy the world, and with it he gives the sign of the rainbow, but for me the olive leaf is more powerful. It comes at the height of the flood, at that point when that ark full of people and critters was blindly dependent on God. At that point, the mute message of the olive leaf seems to me to have been, “Hang on. There’s more out there than you can see.”

Thank God my life is full of olive leaves, little moments when life here on earth seems like it might be in heaven. Moments free of snark, full of kindness, brimming with beauty. Sunsets and migrating geese and a cup of hot coffee made un-requested by someone who loves me. A little promise, each one, that God is still working good in this dark world. Even in January, with the temperatures in single digits and a foot of snow on the ground.

God is faithful, no matter what our eyes tell us. That’s the promise of the olive leaf.