Category: Uncategorized (Page 12 of 71)

I love that the old leaves, the dead ones that are gone now in this picture, are imprinted onto where they used to be.  Their essence is still there.  The new leaves?  Look just like the outline of the old ones, except they’re bright life giving green.  A memory and a promise on the canvas of an old barn side.  I took the photo and then stood for a moment looking and considering.  Because I don’t much like rushing beauty or memory.

Recently, I stood in line at the grocery, in a hurry.  Paper or plastic, mam?  Do you have our shopper’s card?  Is that credit or debit?  Paper.  Yes.  Credit.  And then…..would you like to donate to the American Heart Association?  I don’t know anyone who has had heart trouble.  Not up close, anyway.  But I know a boy who hurts some days because his mama’s heart stopped.  I can’t ever remember actually donating anything at a grocery store cash register.  But this day I stopped my hurry and surprised myself.  “Yes.  I would.”

So tonight, on a paper heart bought with a little extra money, the imprint of “Jan” is written out careful and hung up in the store with a wall of others.  I told her boy what I’d done.  Because the imprint of her is on him.  And I wanted him to know I stood quiet and thought of her, of him.  I wanted him to know it was okay to miss her, to take his time doing it, to not rush to replace or forget or escape.  That imprints mixed with new life can be Love showing Himself. ….the white, lacey reminder of life lived and how it decorates our lives even after it’s gone.

That kept rolling round my head this morning, those title words, like an echoey thundery sound……I know what weary means……I went to sleep last night feeling camped out on the edge of it, afraid my tent would fall off in the night.  I woke up this morning and made my way to my coffee.  I was more than glad to be in an upright position, but still carrying that bricks on the chest feeling.  “Let us not grow weary….” whispered itself into my skull, outta “nowhere”, except that I know where it came from.   How do I do that, God?  Why are you saying that to me?  I sat down heavy in front of my computer and typed in “what does weary mean in Hebrew?”  Why do I keep finding myself here?  I wanted a prescription, something to cure me, immediately.  “Having one’s patience, relish or contentment exhausted; having the strength exhausted by toil or exertion; to weary oneself with traveling; wearing of marching, confinement or study.”

This is hard to write about, hard to think about, hard to speak “out loud”.  I risk being misunderstood.  But the raw of it is, what if everything I do is about me?  Yesterday was a “hollow” day for me.  This is about to get real pathetic, completely shallow and neurotic so hang with me till the end.  I posted on Facebook; little to no response, same with instagram.  I hate Facebook; No, I don’t; Yes, I do.  See what I mean?  I hardly saw any of my friends that day; precious few of them stopped to talk.  Even the kids rushing in to see me at school seemed in a hurry .  Were they really?  Or was it the glasses I was looking through?

I walked in my house at the end of the day, ready to eat lasagna until I forgot about it all when my message light flashed a promising green; my friend checking in.  I grabbed onto it like a rope in the water.  We chatted from our screens for a minute before I ventured that I was feeling “someway”, an indian term someone taught me once that means…..a vague feeling that you can’t find the words for.  Then I typed this.  “It’s back again.  That feeling that I’m an intruder on the face of the earth.”  And just like that, I remembered.  It played itself back in my head, the movie from early that morning.  I’d had to walk by a car with someone in it that I’d felt rejected by and suddenly I felt like a naked nine year old girl running for emotional cover and nowhere to go but right by the car.  It’s possible I heard my bones turn  brittle as I walked by and clinked together all nutty fruitcake.   That  caused me to stick a “needle” in everyone’s arm the rest of the day to siphon off the life juice I needed to push it all back away from me.  Except it wasn’t enough.   No amount of social reciprocation; no amount of solitude could bury that nagging yuck.  I give up, I decided.  I’m too tired to write in my blog and who wants to read it anyway?  I give up taking pictures with a stupid cell phone.  Why am I wasting my time?  I’m too tired to love these kids at school the right way and what if I’m just a fake who passes out love to get love?  Why am I doing any of this?  The questions scared me.  So I went to sleep.

This morning He was waiting for me, the Lover of my soul?  With those words that made me chafe irritable at Him.  “Let us not grow weary in doing good.”  I’m too weary not to be weary, God.  Just fix me.  But it urged me on.  I needed to know what He had for me in it.  How, God?  How?

“When we are in vibrant relationship with God and receiving our fill from Him, we are less likely to push the boundaries God has set for us or to work ourselves beyond what He would ask. We are more apt to recognize what God is calling us to do and what He is not calling us to do. God equips us for what He calls us to (Hebrews 13:20-21; Ephesians 2:10). When God continually fills our spirit, it is impossible to dry up and burn out.”–gotquestions.org

I sat back from my computer screen.  There.  There it was.  Three days.  Three days had gone by since I’d talked to God, except in the way you do when you have a rock in your shoe and it hurts but you don’t stop long enough to get it out?  That nagging, frenetic talking to God.  And I was empty.  So I turned to blog counters, Facebook likes and Instagram hearts, nods and smiles from friends for my atta girl cookies.  And when I was full out panic mode thirsty, I walked myself in front of a car that carried a particular brand of rejection that I was way too friendly with and it took me down the rest of the way.  I had forgotten from whence comes my Help.  I had forgotten my Reason.

The thing about God is, when you’ve looked down at the dust around you, He means to pick you up clean out of it.  I got to school this morning, with doughnuts for my school kids.  Not because I needed them to love me, but because God reminded me I was a container of Him.  He wanted to love them.  I sat at my store table and saw my friend, Amy, coming towards me, just to sit and talk.  Laurie walked by.  “I’m not getting your blog.  Did you take me off your list?  I don’t want to miss it.”   No.  No I didn’t.  I just haven’t written and I smile in my heart as she walks away.  He wanted me to know He wants me to write and He used Laurie to tell me.  One by one the kids came in to give me a hug and I sit and talk to Shane  over a cup of coffee about the paper he wrote for Bible class. such rich conversation for such a young man, I think.  He is one after God’s own heart.  The bell rings and they all scurry off for the morning.  At lunch time I was needed for second grade recess and I found myself in a swarm of bright faces and conversations about pet chinchillas and watch me I can do cart wheels and “TAG!, you’re it!”

At the end of the day Erick and Conner flew in for their special candy in their special drawer and I gave them both hugs and reminded them that they were loved.  Penny sat down at the table in the store waiting on her kids to get out of class, my day now full circle, as she and I pondered together this weary thing, this staying in the race.  I could almost see the glint of iron as we sharpened one another.  As the last kid left and I locked up the store for the day, I heard in my heart…”My  burden, the one I give you, is light.  But you must come to Me first…..and I will give your heart it’s rest…..so that you do not grow weary.”

I couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

I took a wrong turn is all.  I’m known for that.  How many times, I wonder, have I heard my kids from the back seat.  “Mama?  Are we lost again?”  We laugh about it still.  Because it happens still.  And always, I say…..”God?  You know where I am.  Point the way back?”  I know.  Maps and GPS’s and such.  The thing is, for years I’ve been this way and never used any of it to get back.  He would seem to drive my car back in spite of me and I would marvel at the intersection that I found myself in, the one I should have been in in the first place.  Ah life.  The spiritual parallels always make me smile.  I look for those.

Yesterday, all foggy and misty out, my girl and I took ourselves to the shooting range to practice our newfound “skill”.  She seems to have been born with it.  I can spell “g-u-n”……at this point.  But I press on as I press the trigger.  We headed home after, ready for jammies and movies.  It had been a good day off.   And that’s where we drove into new territory.  I realized, as the road started looking nothing like what I anticipated, that I had not been here before.  

I used to panic at these unplanned detours.  And sweat.  And breathe funny.  And grip the steering wheel crazy eyed.  Because somehow I believed that I would never find my way back.  That I might end up living off the land somewhere in a remote part of Iowa.  Now?  I laugh at myself.  I still point my heart upwards.  “God?”  But now I settle into my seat and start looking around.  I had a friend once who taught me to pay attention through a camera lens.  I don’t have a real camera.  But my friend put his camera in my hand and taught me to “see”.  So now I look with different eyes, the ones in my heart and on my face.  I wish I could show him what he’s taught me but he’s gone now.  And so, I turn to my girl beside me; to teach her in turn.   “Do you see ?”  I pull off the road and tramp muddy to get closer to the picture my heart sees.  I click three times.  I learned that from my friend.  You never know what the third click might capture that the first two missed.  I look at my screen and can still hear the dripping sound of melting snow, the faint trace of the smell of tobacco laying forgotten on the barn floor, the cawing of crows circling in the sky above me.  Taking pictures does that; they imprint sounds and smells and feelings in your spirit.  When I go back later, I am startled at the details I missed when it was right in front of me.  They are wordless journals to the journey.

They are compasses in reverse, after the fact, reminders steady of where I was and where I was going that I couldn’t see or know at the time.  This trip home yesterday, off the beaten path away from what I knew?  Reminds me of the proverb I’ve heard many times.  All who wander are not lost.  Sometimes?  The Father of all that passes before, beside and behind me is gifting me with a different perspective.  And teaching me how to set sail with a steady heart.

Steady Heart by Steffany Gretzinger