Gerard and the Rustle

I've been 45 for a couple of weeks now.

Hmm.....I don't feel any different really.

If I stop to think about aches and pains, I realize that I do have a few right now. Is it normal to have lower back pain, hip pain, and shoulder pain when you're 45? Should I been fighting these aches and pains or would my body laugh at me and say, "Don't try so hard sister! You're 45 now and these aches and pains are here to stay."

I don't know what to think. I've never been 45 before.

I wonder how Gerard Butler is feeling.

Clearly he looks well.

Gerard and I share the same birthday. Don't ask me how I know this but I do. He started the same day I did. I wonder if he has aches and pains.

Gerard - rich, famous, successful career, paid to look good. Happy?

Kris - not rich, not famous, don't know what I want to do when I grow up, aches and pains. Happy?

I can't say that everyday is happy but I can say that joy is always an option, and that I'm working on everyday joy despite life's circumstances.

On my walk into work everyday I pass a tree that makes me smile.

I noticed it a couple of weeks ago when the temperatures were absolutely frigid and the first of our snow lay fresh on the ground. The wind was howling that day,straight out of the north, and as I walked into the office I was getting a little grumpy. Then I heard a rustle.

Wind doesn't rustle when it's that cold and your feet are stepping on crispy snow. Wind howls.

I heard a rustle.

I had to stop. I looked around until I could figure out what was rustling and there she was, in all of her beautiful irreverence. It was a maple tree fully clothed in her autumn, brown, leafy sweater.She wasn't allowing the wind to howl through her naked branches but was holding on to her leaves and using them to dance and rustle with the wind.

I loved it.

I smiled at the tree and started back in.

I imagined that tree to be a teenager. She wasn't an enormous tree, but not a baby tree either. She was a teen-aged tree, standing there smiling at me in the midst of her rustling rebellion.

The rustle stopped my growing grump about the frigid temperatures, the early snow, and the howling wind, and graced me with a still moment and a smile. I was also given a reminder that not everything has to happen like I think it should, or even how it has happened in the past. God has unexpected beauty everywhere. I need to hear it, stop, look, and take it in.  Hope is in those moments. Beauty will come in the midst of  frigid, howling moments.

Something inside me wants to believe that there is always a rustle.