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.”