I’m reading about cedar trees this morning.  This isn’t one but it’s a picture gift snapped quick unexpected through the car windshield in front of me when I took notice and gasped delighted.  I love trees.  They stand guard quiet and silent.  They “personify” His presence to me, if a tree can be a person, which to me they rather are.  And the sun shining through just at the right moment like that?  “Peace.  Be Still.  I am.”

Yesterday at church I struggled to hear.  Scrambled to feel “belonged to.”  I have been sorting through my life scrap box and taking note how distraction can take my fixed eyes off the Rail Himself.  And when the distraction gets bored with you and gets distracted itself, it’s work in your head sufficiently accomplished, it’s difficult to quell the echo.  So I sat in that hard pew, hard because my place felt hard,  and listened…..distracted.  Did I hear the word “pray”?  It grabbed me and I looked down at my bracelet given to me by an anchor friend.

Had I talked to God about this?  Like …on purpose?  I’d been batting thoughts like pesky flies but…….this God, this God I’m reading about this morning…..Whose very voice breaks the cedars, thunders His glory, is upon the waters, splits and flashes lightning, makes the wilderness tremble……had He been talking to me?  Could I have actually missed this Voice??  The speaker’s words continued on in the background as I wandered around in my head.  I recall seeing this verse…..I was so distracted I don’t actually remember what I saw it on but the reference was as familiar as my name.  And yet, I found myself feeling like my name had been called out in class.  “Christ has liberated us to be free.  Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.”   It sounded very “admonitiony” and I sat up straighter.  OH.  I had forgotten to stand.  I had submitted.  Again.   I’d found myself on all too terra familiar.  And somehow, I seemed to hear my Father say…..”and now that you hear My voice,  let’s make this particular yoke be the last time.  Yes?”

So right there, in the middle of a sermon that I admit I was paying little attention to, save the “pray” word, I started….praying.  I mean, I had precious little time to waste.  Renew my mind, God.  Let me hear You.  Let me recognize it.

I made my way to a dinner being held after the sermon and mingled on purpose; desperate to see Him in the eyes of His people.  “God.  I will not let go, until I start to hear Your voice above the swell in my ears.  I’m just flat out sick of not.”  I turned to see a woman I’d long wanted to get to know better but….well, the distraction had made me distant….. and spun her around to hug her and look her in the face.  She had a story.  “Sit down,” she said to me and so I sat, ready to hear.  At that moment, right at the moment He’d planned all along, someone “interrupted” our conversation to say hello to my friend.  “Oh!  I know your wife!  I haven’t seen her in s o   l o n g.  Please tell her Tamara said hello!”  And just like that, the recognition set in on his face.  He remembered me.  He’d heard parts of my story.  How was I, he wanted to know.  Good.  I’m good.  Not an easy good?  But a knowing good.  Knowing Whose I am good, knowing the end of the story no matter what good.  “I can tell,” he said.  “You wouldn’t have had to say a thing.  I can see it on your face.”   He sat down and we caught up on all things life.  And then this.  He looked me straight in the eye.  “How can I bless you?”

My eyes filled with tears.  I was caught off guard.  Not that I was  guarded?  But I couldn’t ever remember being asked that so directly by someone, and I swayed a little at it, like a wind blown through quick.  And then I “heard” the whisper in my spirit.  “This is Me.  That is My question.  I stand ready to bless you.  I have all along.”

I woke up this morning.  My hair was a m e s s.  I ate the same green smoothie I always do.  I packed up what to take with me same as any other day.  But something was different.  I had heard His voice.  And I would step over, step on if I had to, the distractions to get to terra firma.  I was ready to break this yoke for good.  I’d seen it slap itself around my heart for the last time.  He had heard my voice and responded with His own.

The voice of the Lord, the voice of the Lord, the voice of the Lord………Hear, oh hear…..the voice of the Lord.

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.