As I walked to the chapel today to participate in some training sessions with our leaders and visiting specialists from Hong Kong, I passed through some of Hanoi's residential neighborhoods, and past some schools. May is a beautiful month here. It offers the delights of many of the flowering trees. These lagerstroemia trees offered their beauty to anyone willing to notice. the blossoms were above me as I walked by, but also scattered beneath my feet. At times one might also find them in the hair of a young girl.
With many streets lined totally by these trees, the effect can at times be overwhelming. It should not surprise one then that the neomodern impressionists in Hanoi, also find these a suited subject for their essays in oils.
The orange petals of a Phuong tree next greeted me as I walked along, again coloring the sidewalk, and here gracing a schoolyard where students play beneath it. I've long associated the time when this tree blossoms with the season when the very best mangos appear in the markets. But now it seems also to be a harbinger of a season of heat and harvest soon ahead.
These too have captured the interest of the painter, though I may be mistaken; or perhaps artistic license has taken liberty with the leaves and manner of growth. We do sometimes bend our perceptions to what we would like to see.
The limits of the color palate in this season and the encounters during my brief walk were not yet reached as I passed the Phuong tree. Close by were yellow petals on the sidewalk and a few meters further along, red petals from another tree offering its contribution to the beauty of this spring day.
We may miss the vibrant color-splashed hillsides of a New England autumn when every tree displays its best pigments in the days before winter, and we may not be blessed to see the acres of tulip fields blooming in unison, or even the glee of the dogwoods coloring the undergrowth of a northeastern forest, but we have joy in the day and the beauty where we are if we can lift up our eyes and behold.
We see beauty in the lives coming into blossom around us here. Our young missionaries and our senior couples alike, seem to have their own hues of bright color and joy as they lose their lives in His service. And although they are most often clothed in white, the magnificence of light and brilliance in seeing someone enter the waters of baptism and emerge committed to following Jesus Christ, cleansed of past wrongs and under the protective covenant of continuing forgiveness as they progress in sacramental increments on the path of repentance, is a sight we never tire of sharing. What joy there is in the spring day of the kingdom in Vietnam!
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