A psalm

45 years old and I’m still wasting time.

Waiting (in vain) for some life to start: waiting for more than just getting through, just finding something to look forward to, just distracting enough to fill moments with meager amusements only to find that it’s all ash and dust, leaving me more hollow, bereft, and with less time to fill, with the quality I crave, than when I started.

What if I – we all – were just honest with Him?

Remembered this terrible plight, admitted our utter inability to be different than we are – (by our own hands and efforts) and held up all these teeny lives for His loving scrutiny, His healing care?

What if I allowed Him to crispify the ugliness, the complete folly and sin of all this wastefulness and trusted Him to transform the ashes to beauty?

What if I were honest? What if I trusted the Life that’s there to be the Life it is and simply let It Be? Simply enjoyed and celebrated that He Is So?

What if I just handed over all-that’s-wrong to All-His-Right?

What if I remembered to celebrate the Life more than I bemoaned the death?

It would not be wasteful. It would not be in vain. It would not be disappointing, hopeless, a dead end, a new regret, or just another guilt infusing pursuit.

The only ashes would be turned beautiful. There would be no more hollows or scramblings, guilt, regret or lost time.

There would be – because there is if we’ll have it – living water brimming up and spilling over.

There would be fullness and it would well up by virtue of its generosity, its very inability to atrophy, and spread more goodness.

Like spring in the light and the warmth, the pulse of this great sleepy life would quicken and enliven to its Creator, by its Creator, because of and in response to His Life in it.

Praise and thanks, great God, for fresh starts, new seasons, and most of all that You Are and So.

Light of the World, Remember!

Floating through

Dragging my feet

Languishing and lazy

‘Til everyday feels like Saturday

With all its special gone.

Seeped and stuck in the sameness (and horror) of “status quo”

I settle.

Where’s my urgency?

Fight? (Not to mention “good fight”?)

Excellence-insistence?

Remembering – and repenting – paves for rallying*

(*rally – to rouse or recover from inactivity)

Takes energy, light.

Where the dark would have me still, stagnate, die off, smother, forget

Light’s instead remarkable: emitting only when electric’s current quickens the matter.

All these particles’ radiation could electrify, could be magnetic,

Push back the dark.

But only would I plug into life’s – light’s – Source

Oh, Lord, may it be so.

Only then will the scales fall

And dark and light’s difference recognized.

It’s there I’ll recognize Him:

There in Him where the real living is.

Where all the dark of wasted (death) days is forgotten and

Right remembrance and good days – enlivening, rich, beautiful, vital, and vibrant life-days are restored.

Like Paul, a blaze of light’s what’s needed, and now given.

Thank You.
Acts 26:12-18, Matthew 5:14

Puckered up

Energy turned inward turns sour.

A relaxed grip

A look outward

Expended on these in my care

And all that wasted tension

Softens

Morphs

Spreads as something useful and

Warms outward in healing waves.

Love is an avalanche of healing fortitude.

A mountain

An ocean

A steppe

A fjord

A forest.

Life’s entire ecosystem.

Not a locked up tension-puckered-toothless-soured littleton.

It’s vista?

Always breathtaking and

Further than the eye can see.

No cheap, temporary, quarter-paid-for-a-limited-view from some man made platform.

Every crevice, ultimate horizon, expansive silence and thundering roiling

Is love’s claim.

Bringing belonging,

Springing forth,

Love changes everything.

All that’s worthy responsively?

Praise and thanks and glory remembered,

Celebrated, savored, taken in and poured back out.

Dear, dear Jesus. All and every smallness and bigness. Deeds done and undone… To You, my Lord. All offerings to You. Praise!

“Send forth your light and your truth,

let them guide me…

Then will I go to the altar of God,

to God, my joy and my delight…

Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God…”

(Psalm 43:3a, 4a, 5a)

A Soul’s Dawn

Those expansive desolate saturated monoculture February fields
Might tempt me towards gray and soggy.

That dissonant electric guitar wail

Could draw me closer to fear or discomfort or distrust.

But I know what’s above the clouds and beneath the surface.

There’s plenty of evidence of what’s not seen too.

A smidgen of belief catalyzes right vision: no airplane’s needed to remind me of light’s sunshiney warming horizon-presence.

Some remembrance goggles is all.

Seeing through a glass darkly

Isn’t the only way to see.

A day’s heaviness of soul

Can break to light.

“I can feel it/Comin’ back again” a fitting and timely song confession cry just now for

Grace’s scandalous help and palpable presence.

Suddenly all this light amidst all this gray

Lights up everything

And I’m reawakened and

Woken to glory.

Glory’s in every song

Every word

Every breath

Every thought and I’m

Opened up to the pleasure and profundity and nothing’s-left-untouch-ed-ness of Love:

I’m right saturated.

A soul’s dawn

Testimony to Life given and repentance honored.

Your condescension is Your glory, and unexpectedly, remarkably, wonderingly, my benefit, Lord.

What a wonder that simply admitting wrong, desiring better, discontent with wasted time, resources, self is enough to turn it all upside down and back to glorious where before there was just muck and gray and a slough of despond.

What a wonder that forgiveness looks more like liberation than penance.

That turning toward the light – even when it’s not in plain sight – is enough to dispel the dark.
And that repenting – literally “turning away from” – what’s wrong is all that’s needed to turn toward that light.

That the remedy that ushers in the right comes from a willingness to face where one’s wrong.

What a blessing to serve a God Who’s much more interested in (my) redemption than (my) wretchedness.

What a joy that He gives 2nd, billionth, zillionth chances to turn toward Him and that He honors such turning every. Single. Time.

Hallelujah that the prodigal son is me and the welcoming forgiving father is Him, and it’s all real and better than I could have imagined. That I’m not just in a story, but the story because it’s His story, and wonder of wonders He invites me into it.
What an opportunity to get to live into love’s inheritance and come into “love’s discovery” as the Indigo Girls sing it.
Husband’s air guitar and

Happy belting “free fallin'” and

Radio crooning and on the way to grocery shopping in all this gray early February day and who knew it could all be alight with wonder?

Who knew that yesterday’s despair could be today’s joy?

Ah, love. You’ll always surprise, won’t you?

You’re the God of the new and the old, the tiny and the magnanimous, the God of the unexpected, the grays, the rainbows, and the everything in between.

You’re in the mud puddles and the pure waters and the failures and the successes.

Thank You. Thank You for being available and awesome and impossibly huge and big enough to come down to the tiny. And thank You that Your coming down enlarges rather than shrinks power and purpose and love and goodness.

I’m smiling and almost overwhelmed with the goodness and the happiness of being back in my Lord’s sight.

Thank You, repentance. Thank You, redemption.

Thank You, Lord, for these, for You, for LOVE… In all Your parts and effects.a

Reclamation

The fullness and

Scope of this

Gulf Stream life

And I’m right saturated and

Even bogged down while moved along.

Regardless of my desire for calmer (stagnant?) waters
I’m the mom

For all practical purposes

But all I feel is to be

“Like butter spread over too much bread”*

*Bilbo Baggins

All these children’s questions

Charge the particles

In my like-an-old-school-tv’s

Snowy insides:
Instead of jolting to life,

Every word

Zaps already taut and sensitive fibers

And this tired old battery sparks only to grinding.
Proof again

That mere machinations

Aren’t the source of life and

Just-function won’t sustain any of us.

Without the proper mechanic’s lifeblood to

Recalibrate all these lifeless moving parts we’re all just

Bound for the junk heap.

Overdue

I wheel myself in for inspection:

Open the hood

Expose the innards

Wait for His assessment.

It took me way longer to get here than it takes for Him to look.

Surprisingly gentle, thorough, and quick

He fusses with something (I don’t see what) and
I expect the damage report – as ever –

To be that this time I’ve ridden too far, too long

Without this scrutiny, this help, this exposure.

Instead, He bids me turn the ignition and

– Expecting dead space –

A deep resonant purr sounds instead.

Instead of more static misfires and sparks

A healthy hum of life and connection fires full and throaty.

Smiling

I shake my head in wonder and thanks and

Roll forward back into the stream

Anticipating a new horizon and steady current to

Carry me along, the Master Mechanic’s prints? My map.

Thank You.

Burdens (and their proper carrier)

Swinging on this crazy pendulum

Between all right and all wrong

Is dizzying, wildly disorienting.

Atrabilious! This brainy black bile

And I feel to be held under by all this care.

Loving ought be liberating:

Come to find out that the world’s weight

Is anything but light.

Then I look up

(A common, but too uncommon theme)

And realize that You’ve been gentlemanly

Standing, waiting

For me to lay all this burden down.

I’ve been bent over with it,

Eyes to the ground

Impossibly straining neath all this weight,

Saturated with the sweat and the load.

I look up at You (finally)

And You smile at me:

All that impossible, tender, complete, understanding, compassionate love in a look.

With nary a word – it took but a second to see you there, to remember You there –

I hand over the load.

It’s not heavy for You:

I don’t know what or how You do with it,

But it’s gone

– or completely changed into something else –

And we walk, You and I.

And there is nothing superfluous or in question

(There is little to be said in true love’s companionship,

Once the repentance is over.)

No more swinging or straining

I find that I am standing upright

Eyes straight ahead

With You

Reconciled and whole and free of all those many burdens

Ready to tackle more

Now strong and courageous

Thanks to the nothing’s-impossible-for-God

God

The next step blessedly clear

And beyond it

A burden not mine to carry.

This moment, this quiet, His assurance

All I’m responsible for.

Hallelujah!