April 17, 2026

Last week, my son and his fiancée asked my husband and me if we would host a groom's dinner (or a groom's picnic, in this case) in our yard the week of their wedding, which is coming up this August. It was an easy and joyful yes! and then my husband and I immediately zipped over to Gerten's Garden Center, ready to spend our entire paychecks trying to whip our yard into shape. What we learned is that it will take about 72 paychecks to get our yard looking like the vision I'd painted in my head, and that expectations need to be lowered. Ok, we can live without a solar-lit stone pathway connecting the front yard to the back. But what I'm not sure we can live without is this:

If you're wondering why that photo is so large, it's because I'm trying to give you a sense of how it felt to turn a corner at Gerten's and come across this: a bright green metal frog, FIVE FEET tall with an arm span of another FIVE FEET, huge googly eyes, and a wide-open mouth, big enough for a child to climb into. It was glorious! We could not see any purpose for it other than fun, and could not stop laughing at the absurdity and joy of it. It's $400 and we have nowhere to put it, so we will not actually be getting this frog, but a week later, we're still laughing about it. And one day, when thinking about this frog, I had a thought as absurd and as joyful as the frog itself -  

What if this frog represents the way God sees us? Tells us something about God's attitude toward the world? What if the creative life force we call God is alwaysapproaching us with wide open arms and a wide open smile? Could it be that God is always just around the corner, trying to get our attention with, "Hey out there! More joy! More whimsy! Let's do this thing together!" Maybe this was how Jesus greeted the women at the empty tomb on Easter morning, or the disciples in the Upper Room. Joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit, after all.

My prayer for you this week is to find some absurdity and joy out in the world, and to respond to it with open arms and a big smile of your own. In the middle of a difficult span of time for both humans and the Earth, maybe it's just what we all need