Rev. Doug Floyd

February 1, 2026

Snow has fallen.The white strewn lawns sparkle in the light. Temperatures remain low. The earth is frozen. There is a certain beauty in death. 

Our lives can easily harden into a frozen state. The cares of the heart. The rote patterns of daily existence. We’re alive and yet, we fail to behold. We can longer see the world afresh in light of our risen Savior. I say we, and I mean me.

My eyes cloud over so easily. The Lord must break open this heart afresh. Micheal O’Siadhail describes this closed heart in his poem, An Unfolding. He describes a ready shoot closed due to the twists and turns of life:

An eager new shoot, I brimmed with sunkissed
boyish dreams of where my years might glide,
little knowing how a bitter frost could decide
the date of flowering, our story’s turn and twist.

I know how the heaviness of this life, of suffering friends, of a world gone wrong can weigh upon the human heart. He describes it like this:

The heart, a frosted bud, tightened like a fist.

And our good and gracious Father can break open the heart and head afresh to him warm showers of love.

Your love—though it disclaims what it achieves—
unclenches me, keeping a watch, loyal yet unblinking,
full of yeses, fresh starts or that silent act
of merely being easy and ample as a mid-spring
coaxing open the horse chestnut’s sweet smelling bract
to lodge sunlight deep in the fabric of its leaves.

Last week, I was supposed to teach at church in Knoxville on the inward disciplines of the spiritual life. The weather confined us to a zoom call. As I prepared, I realized that I needed to talk about a heart broke open by God’s love. 

I had been reading David Adam’s Occasions for Alleluia. A former coal miner, Adam priest for many years and served on Lindisfarne. He wrote many prayers and poems and reflections on the spiritual life. I would highlight recommend him. 

This whole book was calling our hearts to wonder in the abundance of God’s love. He quotes a passage from Augustines last chapter in The City of God. 

All shall be Amen and Alleluia.
We shall rest and we shall see.
We shall see and we shall know.
We shall know and we shall love.
We shall love and we shall praise.
Behold our end, which is no end.

These beautiful words penetrated my heart and opened afresh the God’s unfailing love. Yes our world is in distress. And it has been in distress for thousands of years. Suffering goes on. And yet, the unstoppable love of God has the last word.

Like nightingales, we are becoming love songs of God in the midst of dark places in this world. Sometimes in laughter, sometimes in tears, we reveal the goodness and grace of our faithful God. So let us sing out and rejoice. 

I end this little reflection with a delightful poem from Bobi Jones.

January Song

In the wind the world breaks as songs
When a thrush comes to a gap
Where there are no leaves.
His harpist throat warbles
With nothing in common between him
And the soil below;
He lifts his beak as a clear
Melodic conquest,
And there is nothing around him
Of spring’s freshness and greenness
So the miracle is untainted
By contact with the world,
A shock in history surer than lightning,
More quavering than a baby’s babble.
He orates in the gap and drowns the thick black stillness,
The long isolation, the final unfeeling coldness
That fords the brook of notes. Bravely he stands guard
As if sound’s entire creation depended
On spinning diamonds and jewels from his youthful lungs.
A little hero, he hurls the small stones
At the dark, at the dark, at the dark.
Although neither feather nor head was seen
At home tonight, all who have heard him
Will imitate the flash, multiply the crisis.

Bobi Jones