Category: One Little Word

Lifting

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Sometimes a fog rolls in heavy. All at once with an overnight blanketing of the landscape. Vision cut short without any warning.

Other times, it’s boiling-a-frog style. Slowly increasing morning by morning without enough difference from one layer to the next to cause any great alarm. Until one day, it’s been 20+ months since your last post in this space. And you realize the rising sun hasn’t burned off enough of the weight of it each day to give any relief.

It’s thick now. And I let it happen.

I WAS aware of the silence of my voice. I simply didn’t have the words.

Even this is not fully true. I CHOSE not to FIND the words.

It didn’t just stop posting. I stopped writing. I stopped reading. Stopped looking. Stopped listening. Stopped noticing.

Inside the fog, life’s Crayola-box of hues get mixed into one solid gray. Even when the light pierces through a bit, it’s only to lighten the shade, not split it.

Dimmed. Every life experience just a little bit muted. Like reaching out with a numbed limb unable to fully grasp. Still present. Still grateful. Still alive.

But muffled.

****

I honestly didn’t remember using the word in conversation with one who allows me to speak honestly about my life. It was May. Spring. The season of the bursting forth of new life. And even as we belly laughed together — like we always do — there was a fog over both of us.

Months later she asked, “Are you finding more color these days?”

Color.

As something to be Found.  Unearthed. Discovered. Hunted.

As something to cut through a gloomy mass of gray.

It should not have been a surprise that color can live in the fog, too. I didn’t have to look far. With the ribbons and wreaths and baubles of Christmas, I remembered to see it.

Which is how COLOR became my One Word for 2018. And my mission for the coming days.

To seek COLOR. To let it seek me. And, in the seeking, to lift a fog.

Until all that remains is an unobstructed view of my already abundant life.

When Spring Comes Reluctantly

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I’ve been working against a deadline.

On Monday I will have completed another year of life. 42 of them so far. Another circle around the sun. Another cycle of life. Another end. Another beginning.

It has not been lost on me that the day falls immediately after Easter this year. It did the same 11 years ago when I was cradling a week-old baby in Sunday services. How fresh a resurrection message falls on days like these.

Emerging from Darkness. New Life.  A Birth Day.

In preparation for such a day – especially against the backdrop of Lent – I could not help but think on the need for some dying in my life. On the giving up. The letting go.

What needed to die to make room for new life?
What was I not willing to carry forward into my 43rd year?
Where was my surrender less than everything?

I often do my best work against a deadline.

But the frost on budding trees tells me this. Sometimes Spring comes reluctantly.

It comes in fits and spurts. It comes in fully blooming pear trees outside the tightly closed windows where the furnace has turned back on. It comes in pollen-covered sidewalks traversed by coat-covered people.

Spring does not bow to a deadline. Awakening comes in its own time.

I, too, am coming reluctantly to the turning of a page. As glorious is the spring, the winter lingers still.

There is more dying to be done.

There will be celebration over the coming days. Family. Easter. Birthday.
There will be warm days and deep laughter and lots and lots of life.
There will be Spring.

But deep at the roots – where the darkness never eases – it is the breaking  open that lives on still.

There is no deadline on that.

for the promise of sweet breezes

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I fight the survivor instinct that tells me to revive.

There is a time to die.

My four decades of doing things my way have brought me no closer to the prize – to the wideness of grace, to the deep well of peace, to the loftiness of lightness in my being.

It’s time to stop doing. And start dying.

Some things are a swift and merciful kill. So many others linger right on the edge. My will. My way. It gasps for breath and begs for salvation.

Oh, how it wants more time with me. But as my Jesus himself modeled, the only path to salvation is through death.

Spring is not as sweet without the winter.
New is meaningless if there never has been an old.
Resurrection never comes without first the dying.

And so it turns. Each tick of the clock marching back around to itself.
Circle after circle after circle.

Daily. Moment by moment. My will; my way; my striving; my doing.

It dies.

And from its decay blooms a more glorious way. Higher. Deeper. Wider than my striving could ever have imagined.

*********

Tightly still tucked upon itself.
The bud not ready to bloom.
I think for a moment I am her.
But, no, she is not yet me at all.

Go lower. Past the leaves. Down the stem. Under the surface.
Into the darkness.
I am not bloom, but seed.

Tightly still tucked upon itself.
Refusing to unfold.
Unwilling to die.

The breeze it carries a memory. Of sweet daisy blooms.
Into the soil it penetrates.
And the decaying seed – for the sake of a promise – releases just a bit of its skin.

The tiniest sip of living water expands me beyond today’s bindings.
There is no option but to crack.

To unfold.
For More.

To make room.
For Life.

For when the words write themselves. On me.

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NE Cross“I go to prepare a place,” He said.

Sometimes that place is within driving distance.

A quiet retreat center near Omaha, in this case. The drive a three-day journey.

Each mile a wearing down of the callouses that had grown around me. Each passing exit an invitation to lay down another layer. The ones that had been added to my spirit so slowly and subtlety, I had no sense of how many it would take before the numbness wore off. Nor how exposed the long-neglected feels would become.

“Come away with me,” He whispered, “and let me show you the story of your life.”

The words wrapping around me in hugs. In song. In conversation. In scripture. In nature. In laughter. In tears. In silence.

Abundance. Peace. Blessing. Faithfulness. Grace.

A feast of words I was unaware of my hunger for.

Until I came open. Exposed. Turned inside out.

I went to a writer’s conference and didn’t write a thing.

For I was the canvas, not the pen.

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Linking this reflection of Small Wonder with my friend and fellow blogger, Kelly Chripczuk, who hosts a Community of blogging Beauty Hunters at her site. Because our Big God shows himself in the most amazing small ways.#smallwonder

Inside Out Light (#smallwonder)

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Psalm764 Cindee Photography
photo by Cindee Snider Re, originally designed for #sundaycirclegroup, used with permission

Not once in my entire life have I considered myself “resplendent.” I doubt, in fact, I have described anything in that manner.

Radiant. Glowing.

On my wedding day, perhaps. Maybe the junior prom — my first real dress-up event.

Even there I speak of looking radiant. Feeling a glow.

But BEING resplendent?

The Psalmist tells God He is. Resplendent that is. More majestic than the mountains. (Psalm 76:4)

So as I reflect that I dwell with God but that He also dwells in me, I must consider that His qualities, too, live beneath my skin.

I could get a spray tan. Add glitter to my eye shadow. Wear a sequined dress.

But that would only make me shiny.

Resplendence, instead, rises slowly to the surface. It’s an inside out light.

The fullness of all the beauty of God Himself, fanned forever by the Holy Spirit.

In. Me.

Can you imagine?

I hope you can. Because it’s in you, too.

So let us ready our vessels. Let us welcome the rising. Let us be polished. Let us be resplendent.

Indeed, we already are.

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Linking this reflection of Small Wonder with my friend and fellow blogger, Kelly Chripczuk, who hosts a Community of blogging Beauty Hunters at her site. Because our Big God shows himself in the most amazing small ways. #smallwonder

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