Category: Uncategorized (Page 17 of 71)

This is my boy.  My firstborn.  This is what he’s like……the dreamer of big dreams, always looking forward on the horizon for the next big adventure.  I suspect that wanderlust transferred to him through the blood that coarsed through the umbilical cord.  I so get this about him. He used to say, “I’ll be the uncle that comes back from Africa with elephant tusks and tells big stories.”  As it turns out, that is exactly what will happen.

He’s been to Africa once.  For a year.  And came back telling big stories.  He found himself helping to birth a child in a remote village in Uganda.  He stood before people who could not speak his language and told them about God while a man stood beside him translating his words.  He spent hours learning the craft of video production and all things beyond what his mama could understand.  He came back changed and hungry for more.  But God brought him home to grow him some more.  To make him ready to go back.  Because I knew he would.

In barely a weeks’ time I will stand at the airport window and watch his plane point to Cape Town.  And it will feel like giving birth all over again.  Only this time, without the epidural or the sterile environment and helpful nurses to clean up the mess of life and giving it.  I will stand in the middle of friends.  I will stand in the middle of strangers, others saying hello and goodbye, and it will hurt and make my bones creak as they resist grabbing on and not letting go.  And I will cry tears that make me tired and take stock of the tear down the front of my gut.  I will wave at him brave and say hello and good bye all in one breath; to the boy I carried and  to the man who walks away strong in front of me.

This business of loving people, of giving birth to them, of saying hello and goodbye?  It is a beautiful wound.  It is the business of living.  I take it in with a deep shaky breath.  And I will stare hard at the glint of the sun on my boys’ plane.

I snapped this picture this morning; rather I sat my phone down and the camera saw beauty and clicked it quick.  I looked at the screen and smiled inside.  Is this what snowflakes look like to God, I thought?  It’s a snow day today and my girl sleeps quiet on the couch where we’ve set up winter camp.  Our house is big and old and drafty and so we closed the door between Antarctica in the living room and log cabin cozy in the “wooden room” as we call it, walls all cedar and homey, and the warm of space heaters creeps through our favorite rooms and we stay settled there; until spring rings our doorbell.

I woke up eager like five years old and wrapped me up in hoodies and scarves and took a silly selfie because joy bubbled up and I wanted to be outside in the lacy world and just breathe in and out.  These are times when I think about the boy and miss him, miss him slamming me to the ground and rubbing dog poop on my clothes.  I want to call him and ask him to come out and play in the snow.  To love hurt turn back into love made deeper by shared pain mended by Him.

It’s funny how outside makes me so happy. It feels like God’s front porch. I read a bright shiny reminder on my newsfeed from one of my favorite women of Truth, Christine Caine, and it sparkles in my head like fireworks…..”You are capable of amazing things!” it crackled through the air like a telegraph sound.  You.  I’m talking to you,  says my God to me.  Tell the others. Grab their hands and take them with you.  Tell them about Me.

There is a joy in the journey.  There is.  Not from money.  Or all things going right.  Not from photoshop or importance.  Not from sexy or control top pantyhose.  Not clever or talent or humility in your cleverness or talent.  Not good manners or chic tastes.  Not healthy salads or chia seeds.  Or sparkling wine or refraining from drinking sparkling wine….all the choices we make.

There is a joy in this journey because the maker of beautiful snowflakes has His eye on you.  And He wants to do amazing things.

I woke up just now and brewed my coffee strong and grabbed my new book, broken in by smelling it, and the first few lines have me in a state of YES. AMEN. and WOW.  First of all because the author writes from a plane just ready to take off in a state where there are mountains.  I just did that , not three weeks ago.  I love mountains; literal and figurative.  Big ones, foothills..  Mountains challenge me, keep me interested, slay me with their majesty, take my breath away when I climb them, live them.  Mountains symbolic cause me to see Him.  If I could, I would live in and surrounded by mountains, with the occasional trip to the prairie to sit in the cornfields, just to catch my breath.   One of my favorite moments in life was stopping spontaneously to hike a mountain trail in Aspen, Colorado.  It was 80 degrees in town that day when we set out.  There was 3 inches of snow on the car when we got back.  

That’s how I like life served.  I’m a sucker for adventure, for the one two punch that unexpected twists and turns bring.  I sign up for it willingly.  If the caveat on the form says, “do at your own risk”, I write the check.  “Easy trail, no hills.”  No hills?  No thanks.  The thing is, with hills come valleys.  Sometimes you walk through the shadow of death; death of dreams, death of agendas, death literal.  Valleys are the friends of hills.  It comes with the fragile tundra of life.  It makes us who we are becoming.  I hate the way they scrub me raw some days but the cost of bypassing them is too great a loss.  I don’t want the luxury of being able to choose that.

The lovely thing is, the Father of my heart does this thing I marvel at.  He sends me human carabiners.  I read this in my book this morning, “Their company is a Sabbath to me.  Their lively conversation, pure inspiration……We can work through subjects at warp speed and adapt to each one with a brand new mood.  The harder the season we’re going through, the funnier we tend to get to each other.  It’s not that we like to be miserable.  It’s that we share a deep-abiding commitment to milking the absurdity out of every holy cow of a calamity that treats itself to the grass in our pastures.  We cry hard.  We laugh hard.”   (Beth Moore, Audacious)  I jumped in my spirit when I read those words, like a lighter had ignited something in me.  That is the gift my Abba gives me.  He constantly tethers my soul to people who want to invest, who hold me firm to His truth when I want to run screaming on fire.

I know I’m a bundle to deal with.  I want to curl up cozy in your world and talk and listen and not say a thing; all of it. I have been pushed away because of that and it makes me bleed from my heart.   But thanks be to the maker of quirky people like me, He knew I’d need Sabbath people in my life that keep me to my trail, that want to hike it with me.  And I am forever surprised when He sends me a new one.  Yesterday I heard my phone ding all cute and I opened a message from someone I have yet to meet, save through encounters with her kids at school and Facebook, the entity I love to hate and hate to love.   But this day it laid a gift at my door.

“I just wanted to tell you how much your new friendship has meant to me!  You have touched my children in such a special way!….Have a wonderful week and we are praying for you specifically this week as we fast.”

And just like that, I felt a tug on my “belt”.  Another carabiner had been added.  I love that idea….Sabbath people.  I want to be that to others.  I want to sit in the company of those who want to sit in my company and cry hard and laugh harder and make messes in each others’ kitchens and make my soul pause and listen and consider and sift.  I feel myself yearn some days for my forever home.  I love it here where I am passing through.  I do.  I love sowing and gardening in the soil of others. But my soul has a tiredness to it that makes me hear the soundless trumpet and I look up and around for the source.  “I want to go home, God.”

“Not yet, girl.  Not yet.  I have things for you still.  But I’ll give you carabiners, I’ll give you rest in the wake of waiting.”