We just finished a three-day holiday weekend here in Japan. The nation celebrates the spring equinox every year on March 21. Since this year the twenty-first fell on a Sunday, today was declared a national holiday. Lots of young couples choose this weekend to be married, like Andrea and I did 34 years ago in Seattle. I had the opportunity to perform three weddings this holiday weekend.
This weekend, the cherry blossoms have revealed their faces in a “peek-a-boo-like” fashion, only to say, “ready, or not, here I come” this next weekend. Countless multitudes will make their ways to parks around the nation with their picnic baskets, families, girl and boy friends and sit under the fragrant blooming trees and blue skies. Then with a brisk and quick day of wind, the blossoms will all fall to the ground. But before they do, we will be able to say as . . .
Ken Watanabe did in the movie LAST SAMURAI with his last breath, “Perfect. They are all perfect.”
A personal paraphrase of 1 Peter 1:24-25 on this beautiful spring day could read:
“We are all like the cherry tree, and all our glory like the cherry blossom. The winds of life’s struggles, tests and trials, blow; we dry out and get old, and the glory of our long-life falls (in) to the ground. But the WORD of the Lord, His promise of eternal life with Him, endures forever.”
Yay, God!