Walk into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They don’t fuss with their appearance — but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the wildflowers, most of them never even seen, don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? [Luke 12: 27-28]

I used to work in midtown Manhattan at Saint Bartholomew’s Church. New Yorkers speak not of four seasons but of five. Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and August which they call — I’m not making this up — “the season of weird smells.” All her asphalt collects the summer’s heat so that by August anybody who works in New York learns to walk on the concrete and not on the subway grates lest you get a pungent whiff of what bakes below. It can take your breath away.

August is quiet time in Washington. For me it’s not quiet, not now anyway. I’ve got a lot to do and a lot on my mind, not the least of it being that Gillian is soon leaving home for college. So I am arrested by this passage of scripture this morning. Jesus is whispering something about the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor spin, and it is one of the hardest of his sayings. The least harsh or vatic — one of the most watercolor of all Jesus’s utterances — turns out to be one of the most radical and hard to swallow.

I had a dream last night, the kind I have rarely, that’s less a dream than a memory. Gabriel was two in the dream as in the memory. We were lying in bed. He was wearing swim goggles and twirling his hair. I was reading a story to him that he was eager to get to the end of not because he was disinterested but because he wanted to know how it would finish. He kept asking me to “Turn the page!” before I could complete the page we were on. Again and again he kept saying punctiliously “Turn the page!” until finally I asked him, “How do you know that the page we’re on is not the most important of them all?”

The Book of Genesis wherein Jacob’s story is told begins with the refrain “And it was evening and it was morning, the first day… . And it was evening and it was morning, the second day… .” and so on the refrain continues in what was for your Creator a pretty good week of work. That refrain is peculiar, and characteristic of the Bible: it means to make us question how we normally think. We think a day begins with the morning and ends with the evening.

God does his best work at night. And here we have this story of Jacob, this beautiful and astonishing dream he’s given in his sleep, the angels descending and ascending and the promise given to him who deserved it not at all, “I will be with you wherever you go.” In the middle of the night fifteen years ago my wife woke and rolled over to hear our daughter Gillian who was as fast asleep as Jacob was. We would tuck the Gillian girl into her bed at night and usually she would end up in ours. Victoria rolled over to hear Gillian, sound asleep, singing “Kum ba ya ma da” as if she were frisking with fairies.

George MacDonald, a great writer greatly neglected, wrote, “I believe that if there be a living conscious love at the heart of the universe, the mind in the quiescence of its consciousness in sleep, comes into a less disturbed contact with the heart of the creation. The cessation of labor affords but the necessary occasion, makes it possible as it were for the occupant of an outlying station in the wilderness to return to its Father’s house for fresh supplies.”