one hundred and one dots

I pull the book a tad bit closer, at first. Then, instinctually, I extend my arm out to its full length and tilt the book towards the light. I repeat this process with as much subtlety as possible but the truth is evident.

My eyes are struggling.

I am no longer able to read, hour after hour. When I look up from a focused task to gaze out the window, it takes a few moments for my eyes to focus on the distant view. Sometimes, it never fully does.

Many times I think I can see more than I really do. As a general rule, I drive the same streets and know each route by heart. Much of my daily routine is so rote that it is a rare thing, indeed, when I must  stop to read instructions.

The last time I stopped by a coffee shop, I squinted and squirmed and strained in order to clearly make out the drink choices printed on the wall and place my order with confidence. In the end, I went with an Americano with an extra shot. It’s what I knew.

This is all so strange and new to me. I used to pride myself on my ability to see clearly and without assistance, as if it was some great wonder to still be able to see clearly and effectively with my own eyes, alone. As if perfect vision was a reflection of something greater in me.

But here’s the thing. It’s not just the words in books or on street signs or across back lit café menus that are shrinking and morphing and eluding me. Many days, it feels like everything is.

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To read the rest, please follow this link over to 

TheMudroom Blog where I am guest posting today.

An Invitation Like You've Never Known

I am so incredibly honored and excited to share space here today with Erika Morrison. Erika is one of the most vulnerable writers I know. It is evident that she keeps intimate company with the Holy Spirit and thus I implicitly trust what spills out on the page as a result of her deep and genuine soul searching. Her words have always--always--reached down into my hidden spaces to reveal the scared, yet shimmering truth of who I am.  

Today, her book Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul releases. Please hear me when I tell you this: you must read this book. 

In Bandersnatch, it feels as if Erika has taken the intimacy of all her previously written whispered truths and plumbed even deeper.
And yet she does it all with a gentle yet persistent voice. She writes just like she talks in real life--drawing you in close, welcoming you in. 

Bandersnatch illumines the truth that we are weird and wonderful and beautiful and completely unique artist souls and that our fully living into and out of those creations is the very essence of our life's work here on Earth. The world needs us to be avant-garde, to practice alchemy and to be anthropologists who "gaze at humanity with a love that is an eternity long and wide and high."

Erika declares for us (because most of us don't believe it) that we are artists. We are made to create and the Kingdom of God is depending on our doing just that.

"So take your molecules and your moments and your unprecedented mess and the intoxicated music of your life and make a masterpiece that reflects the truth. Because on the other side of Jesus, art is a revelation of the kingdom, a kingdom revealing God through billions of different kaleidoscopic expressions. Art, your art, is absolutely vital because your art is how Jesus is made known to the world."

Erika and I want to know: Do you believe it? 

Please join me in welcoming Erika here today and please get a copy of this book.

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The cardinals make it look so easy. The honeybees make it look so easy. The catfish and the black crow, the dairy cow and the cactus plant, all make being created appear effortless. They arise from the earth, do their beautiful, exclusive thing and die having fulfilled their fate.

None of nature seems to struggle to know who they are or what to do with themselves.

But humanity is the exception to nature’s rule because we’re individualized within our breed. We’re told by our mamas and mentors that--like snowflakes--no two of us are the same and that we each have a special purpose and part to play within the great Body of God.

(If your mama never told you this, consider yourself informed: YOU--your original cells and skin-print, guts and ingenuity--will never ever incarnate again. Do you believe it?)

So we struggle and seek and bald our knees asking variations of discovery-type questions (Who am I? Why am I here?) and if we’re semi-smart and moderately equipped we pay attention just enough to wake up piecemeal over years to the knowledge of our vital, indigenous selves.

And yet . . . even for all our wrestling and wondering, there are certain, abundant factors stacked against our waking up. We feel and fight the low ceiling of man made definitions, systems and institutions; we fight status quo, culture conformity, herd mentalities and more often than not, “The original shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out of all our other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.” ~Frederick Buechner

So, let me ask you. Do you know something--anything--of your true, original, shimmering self?

I don’t mean: Coffee Drinker, Jesus Lover, Crossfitter, Writer, Wife, Mama.

Those are your interests and investments.

I do mean: Who are you undressed and naked of the things that tell you who you are?

Who are you before you became a Jesus lover or mother or husband?

Who are you without your church, your hobbies, your performances and projects?

I’m not talking about your confidence in saying, “I am a child of God”, either. What I am asking a quarter-dozen different ways is this: within the framework of being a child of God, what part of God do you represent? Do you know where you begin and where you end? Do you know the here-to-here of your uniqueness? Do you know, as John Duns Scotus puts it, your unusual, individual “thisness”?

I can’t resolve this question for you, I can only ask you if you’re interested. (Are you interested?)

I can only tell you that it is a good and right investment to spend the energy and time to learn who you are with nothing barnacled to your body, to learn what it is you bleed. Because you were enough on the day of your birth when you came to us stripped and slippery and squeezing absolutely nothing but your God-given glow.

And who you were on that born-day is also who you are now, but since you’ve been living on this planet long enough to learn how to read this article, then it follows that you’ve also lived here long enough to collect a few layers of horsefeathers and hogwash.

So, yet again, I’m inquiring: What is it that you see before the full-length bathroom mirror after you’ve divested of clothes and masks and hats and accessories and roles and beliefs and missions and persuaders and pressures--until you’re down to just your peeled nature, minus all the addons mixed in with your molecules?

Do you see somebody who was made with passion, on purpose, in earnest; fearfully and wonderfully, by a Maker with a brow bent in the center, two careful hands, a stitching kit and divine kiss?

Can you catch between your fingers even the tiniest fragment of self-knowledge, roll it around and put a word to it?

Your identity is a living organism and literally wishes to unfurl and spread from your center and who will care and who will lecture if you wander around a little bit every day to look for the unique shine of your own soul?

One of the central endeavors of the human experience is to consciously discover the intimacies of who we already are. As in: life is not about building an alternate name for ourselves; it’s about discovering the name we already have.

Will you, _______, rise from your own sacred ash?

Because the rest of us cannot afford to lose the length of your limbs or the cadence of your light or the rhythm of your ideas or the harmony of your creative force. The way you sway and smile, the awkward this and that and the other thing you do.

These are the days for opening our two clumsy hands before the wideness of life and the allure of a God who stops and starts our hearts. These are the days for rubbing our two imperfect sticks together so we can kindle another feeble, holy light from the deep within--each of us alone and also for each other.

There is no resolution to this quest; the only destination is the process. But I hope there’s a small spark here that will leave you wanting, that will leave you with a blue-fire lined in your spine, that will inspire a cellular, metamorphic process in you; an odyssey of the soul unique to you and your individual history, organisms, and experiences.

There is maybe a fine line between being lethargic about learning ourselves and not being self-obsessive and with that tension in mind, how do we begin (or continue) the process of unearthing and remembering the truth of our intrinsic selves?

Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul was written because sometimes we all need a little hand-holding and butt-nudging in our process; someone or something to come alongside us while we pick up our threads of soul discovery and travel from one dot and tittle to the next.

We are the Kingdom people and learning your own fingerprint is something of what it means for the Kingdom to come in response to an earth which groans forth it’s rolling desire for the great interlocking circle of contribution to reveal the luminous and loving Body of Christ and slowly, seriously--like it’s our destiny--set the world to rights.

Kingdom come. Which is to say: YOU, [be]come and carve your glorious, powerful, heaven-appointed meaning into the sides of rocks and communities and cities and skies.

|||

Without being formulaic and without offering one-size-fits-all “how-to” steps, Bandersnatch is support material for your soul odyssey; a kind of field guide designed to come alongside the moment of your unfurling.

Come with me? And I will go with you and if you’re interested, you can order  wherever books or ebooks are sold.

Or, if you’d like to read the first three chapters and just see if Bandersnatch is something for such a time as the hour you’re in, click HERE.

All my love,

Erika Morrison

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If Erika's words above struck something deep in you and you feel yourself longing for more, you must check out her book trailer, here.

It is hauntingly beautiful.

Thorns, Joy & Holy Braids

It's so natural, intuitive even, to settle one's vision on the rough parts of anything. It's the way we protect ourselves.

Whenever we know exactly what we are dealing with, we feel we are better prepared to fight against it or rise above it or bring it under our control. When there is an enemy, it is always better to have the upper hand. And the way to gain that advantage is to know every side of the evil.

So, we study it. We caress it's edges. We keep it close at hand so, in the moments between other moments, we can pull it out and remember how it wants us.

And oh, how it wants us.

Its pursuant tendrils silently wrap and curl into our shadowed folds and feed on the darkness. And the rough and the dark? They become silent, parasitic partners.

We believe we are armed for battle when, really, we are wasting away in our deepest places.

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In nature, thorns are fortifications that protect a plant from being eaten by predators. A great many fruits and edible flowers are kept alive by the trails and rings of thorns surrounding them.

My life this past year? It has been rife with trails and rings of thorns. Walking alongside my mom through her illness and chemotherapy and eventual death was the most difficult thing I have ever done. And my default? More often than I care to admit, it has been to succumb to the vacuum of scarcity that Life's defense manufactures. Because when all I see and feel and experience is prickly and nettlesome, I can't help but feel shut out from the beauty.

But that's exactly the arc of the great ache--that our experiences that are often strewn with thorns are but stations on a path ringed with beauty and joy. If a thorn's design is to protect, then it follows that their presence is purposeful and necessary. They remind us that all the things that are true and noble and reputable and authentic and compelling and gracious are prized and sought after. They remind us that joy and pain are profoundly intertwined. 

For me, this is where my faith in a God of grace and mercy becomes manifest. For when I am willing to take the joy and the pain in both hands, God's immense love and care for me provide yet a third cord. Taken together, they become a holy braid that is not easily broken. 

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Where are you, today, friend? Are you knee-deep in the pain and struggle? Do you feel wrapped in thorns, as if Life wanted to "protect" you from the good you see and that others seem to have in spades? Perhaps, your go-to response is bitterness, anger or, worse, indifference. What if there was another way?

I wrote today's post as a way of partnering with Margaret Feinberg and to help spread the word about her latest book Fight Back With Joy. 

This book began as an intense study of the over 400 references to joy in Scripture. Margaret was in the final stages of writing her book when she received a cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, all the sources of joy that she had discovered were turned on their head in the shadow of her illness. In an instant, her understanding of true joy was called into question. In writing Fight Back With Joy  Margaret "discovered facets of joy that no one ever taught me—more than whimsy, joy is a weapon we can use to fight life’s battles."

Fight Back With Joy 6-Session DVD Bible Study Promo Video from Margaret Feinberg on Vimeo.

You can purchase the book at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Margaret has also created a 6-session DVD Bible Study kit that is available for purchase. 

Sometimes you have to poke holes in the darkness until it bleeds light. 

#fightbackwithjoy

Of Things That Have Been

I finger them mindlessly most days,

These tokens of thanksgiving.

In some familiar corner of my brain I am

aware of their weight and

the anorexic string that

keeps them connected to a well

untended.

But something has shifted

inside of me and

I can’t remember

how to see.... 

To keep reading this poem, please follow this link

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I am writing today over at my beautiful friend Elizabeth Marshall's home, 

Poetry & Prose Through A Lens of Grace.

She extended a gracious invitation to several of her friends that write poetry and I am honored to be included in that circle.

Elizabeth and I have a history of mingling words and images and stirrings of the heart.

Together, we created Adagio, a writing "pas de deux" of sorts where we wove our words together to pen poems. 

Quite a bit of life has happened between that last project and now, as well it should have. But we are both very excited to join together again in the new year. It is our hope that you will journey with us.

The Murmuration of the Body

I remember the first time I witnessed the beautiful choreography of a flock of starlings in flight.

It was a sharply cool autumn afternoon and I had just finished spinning in circles, arms spread, hair flying. As I came out of my twirl I crumpled onto a clump of thick grass and felt the earth sway wildly beneath my splayed body. When I opened my eyes I gazed dreamily at the polished sky.

They entered my field of vision from the left. Like a swarm of gnats hanging angrily in the summer heat, they presented thick and dark. I saw them before I heard them. But as they drew closer, their cackling caught up to their riotous numbers and they soon overtook the entire sky.

Their form was, at once, epic and ephemeral. They ballooned into one grandiose bell shape and then, like chimney smoke caught up in a gust, they turned direction and bellowed wide and constringed.

Again and again, they swelled and contracted, bulged and narrowed. I was awe struck.

I behold this phenomenon twice a year now, when the birds arrive out of nowhere and alight on the branches and fields surrounding my house. Still, but tittering, they pulse with an energy and then, at the striking of some ethereal cue, arise as one. Most times, I drop whatever I am doing and race outside to catch their appearance.

I am often struck silent as I stare, even when accompanied by my children. Some experiences need no words. Sometimes, lessons are garnered in the quiet spaces broken open by the miracle.

I'm writing over at SheLoves Magazine today and I would love for you to join me in the comments. Just click here.

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Photo credit: Richard Smith 

Dinner With The Magician

She called just a day before she would be rolling through town, hope dripping round the corners of her question. Was there a chance I might be available for a visit when she passed through? It would be a quick stay, just overnight, but wouldn’t it be lovely? Gratefully, our days are wide open as of late and I had just washed the sheets and whose heart doesn’t smile all Cheshire-like when old friends come calling?

I hope she heard the joy in my response because, although I was excited about our reunion, it had been quite a number of years since last our eyes had met or our arms had encircled. Childhood friendships can run deep as the ocean but years apart can also seem to magnify the wide expanse of those sacred waters and such a gulf has the potential to swallow you right whole.

She arrived with a bottle of wine under one arm, a loaf of crusty bread under the other and a laugh so strong as to unshackle fear in any heart. Oh, how I remembered that laugh! How it was both winsome and inviting, how its genuineness removed all self-effacement. Smiling, I took her offerings of bread and wine and placed them on the table and I felt something let loose within me.

We set to the task of preparing dinner, each of us stationed across from one another. She sliced cantaloupe, I cut vegetables and, together, we began the slow dance of catching up on lives lived apart from each other for years. At first, we revisited what was familiar. We recalled favorite memories, we reenacted infamous moments. All that we held in common became burnished to glowing by our careful curating of memory.

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I'm writing over at SheLoves Magazine today and you can find the rest of this story by following this link here.

When God's Face Is A Technicolor Zinnia

In ways familiar and comforting the Earth has tilted just so these last few weeks. 

At times, I have stood quiet, feet planted still, eyes peering into the woods just across the way. The barren tree limbs—skeletal and brittle, worn from a winter long and brutal, bark stained ebony against the leaden skies—they began to pulse. And deep in the hidden places, there was a quickening, a return to life.

I watched as naked branches swelled with promise, and like outstretched hands with fingers unfurling, the tips glistened as they caught the deeper shafts of sunlight. Their buds, like strings of pearls, gave way to festoons of leaves and in a twinkling, the woods were suddenly verdant and alive.

The seasons of the Earth, they are saving me these days.

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The rest of my words can be found today over at SheLoves Magazine. Join me there by clicking this link?

After your leaving

The days spin silently

and I am vacuous

in their wake

mindful of the practice

of living

but bereft 

nonetheless

 

I was not aware 

the depth of

minor rituals

and how our speaking them

to each other

pulled taut

at my sacred spaces

hemming me in

behind and before

The morning sun

falls flat 

stretching just long enough

to find the dirt smear

on the tile

I rub it halfheartedly with my toe

but nothing changes

Today

however

I heard about the hummingbirds

how they have returned

seeking nectar 

how they eat just enough

to fuel their flight

each minute

So I retrieved the feeders

their red bases 

faded from so many days

in the sun

and I filled them to the brim

sweet and dripping

A small but mighty

offering

The land of the living

is full of such sacraments

evidently

Soon I will walk

stronger 

Until then

I will just gaze upon my

Ebenezer

 

Saving Daylight

I caught sight of it as I passed the window yesterday
down the driveway thick with mud and gathered puddles
Three birds in silhouette
the afternoon sun flooding them from behind
taking a bath

My lips curled skyward
and I stood motionless
for five whole minutes
Because
the audacity

The day before that
you pretended to be Huck playing in the bulrushes
and you brought me handfuls of cat tail fluff
my palms opened to the offering
and you glowed

The dark earth, moist with thaw
has begun its heaving heavenward
pushed from below
until, split open like the body
it becomes broken

Then, today
I turned that last corner out of the woods
and came up on the lake
glimmering with a thousand
salvos of light

And I'm clutching all of it
with an unbecoming fierceness
hell bent on gathering glory
as if it wasn't raining
right round

This Mortal Coil

The words pierce through the late morning light that hangs
drowsy and dust filled and glistening
and just like that
there is no way to breathe

Instinctively I fly to touch him
memorize his lips and jowls and fingertips
trace the shadow of his profile
hear the cadence within his chest
be sure of him

Whenever Death runs past
a vale of tears cuts a gorge
right through the center of
all that was known or promised
and we become wild and frantic
for life

I eventually settle and draw in
what is left of the day
seizing moment after glorious moment
like a greedy beggar
my heart keen on wanting it all

As the sunlight stretches long across the room
I feel the pull of weathered thread
that winds then meanders then weaves itself
through the fingers of all my loves
The one that holds us fast to earth
and to each other
has weak spots

I know this
yet I want to pull all the tighter
draw in the goodness so I will have it
always
entwine the bright colored thread fast
around the faded one
to keep it from shuffling off
this mortal coil

In which there is Poetic Justice, for God is a Poet, but there is also Mercy

I am honored to open up space today for the words of Anita Mathias. Anita and I first connected in the comments section of a piece I wrote for SheLoves. A few months later she asked me to write a guest post over at her place. Clearly, we share an admiration for each other's words. Please join me in welcoming Anita to 

A Lifetime of Days.

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Even while Esau was out hunting his father’s favourite wild game, Jacob and Rebecca slaughtered and cooked two choice young goats-- which Jacob served to Isaac, pretending to be Esau, stealing his blessing.

A cruel deception.

And, uncannily, years later, in his own old age, Jacob’s sons sold his favourite son into slavery, dipping Joseph’s precious robe in the blood of a slaughtered goat, claiming he had been killed by a wild beast.

Tricked with a goat, just as he had tricked his own father with a goat.

* * *

The seeds we sow, we reap, measure for measure. They lie dormant in the earth, sometimes for years, then yield their harvest.

The good we have done yields blessing, and the evil we’ve done conjures shadowy forces against us.

And that’s scary if we have sown bad seeds, have said and done less than luminous things, things we are now ashamed of.

* * *

But we do not live in a mechanical universe. We live in a just universe, shot through by mercy like a golden cord.

The law of sowing and reaping is the deep magic from the dawn of time, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase.

However there is a more powerful force still: the force of mercy, unleashed by the willing victim who bore in his body the punishment for all the bad seeds we have ever sown.

And so mercy triumphs over justice. The deep magic from before the dawn of time.

Jacob recovers Joseph; Esau was, in fact, blessed.

* * *

For myself, I want to sow good seed for the rest of my life.

But the bad seed I have sown? The things I am ashamed of? The things I did because of my small, bewildered, wounded heart?

I confess them.

I ask God’s forgiveness. I ask Christ’s blood to cover them.

And I step into the waterfall of mercy, the mercy that triumphs over justice because the One who loves the world is good.

I ask him to let all the bad seeds I’ve sown, which are still dormant, die.

And I ask him for grace to overplant much good seed to crowd out the bad seed.

And I ask him, the ultimate genetic engineer, to somehow, even now, change the DNA of the bad seed I’ve planted, and bring good from them.

And I place my life and future in His hands.

(Photo credit: Jenny Downing)

_____________________________

Anita Mathias is the author of Wandering Between Two Worlds

(Benediction Classics, 2007). She has won a writing fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The London Magazine,  Commonweal,  America, The Christian Century, and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies.

Anita lives in Oxford, England with her husband and daughters. She blogs at Dreaming Beneath the Spires. You can find her on Twitter @anitamathias1 or on Facebook at Dreaming Beneath the Spires.

The Thing With Feathers

I grew up in a family that loved birds. As far back as my mind can remember, I have opened my eyes each morning and quickly found a window through which I could spot the birds already bustling about the yard.

My childhood house had a tall window over the kitchen sink and just outside there stood a sweet little redbud tree with heart-shaped leaves. It was just tall enough for its limbs to reach to where we stood inside and from one branch we hung a modest little feeder. Most of the time, however, we just threw bread crusts and stale crackers on the ground. I think the birds liked those the best.

My dad taught me the name of every single bird that visited. His eyes always lit up at the flighty dance of the chickadees or the flashing red of a cardinal and with every new arrival he welcomed them by name, like old friends returning from a lengthy absence.

That is how it always felt when the juncos appeared. We called them “snow birds” because they always arrived on the cusp of cold weather and were nature’s gentle reminder that winter was on its way.

Over the years my dad’s vast ornithological knowledge gradually seeped into the corners of my little head and, to this day, I can still name every bird I see. It is one of the greatest gifts my father has ever given me.

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You can read the rest of my words by following this link over to SheLoves Magazine.

Weave

Oh, 2013!
You have been remarkable. Truly.

It was on this day, last year, that I chose a word for you. I was perched on the edge of a whole new chunk of days and for the first time, I chose a word with which to walk out that gift of time.

WITH

I wrote a sort of proclamation for myself, a manifesto declaring my intentions for moving forward into the new year.

with
prep.

-in the company of
-next to, alongside
-in the charge or keeping of
-in support of
-among
-in spite of
-in the same direction as
-so as to be touching or joined to

TheFreeDictionary.com

It was the last line of intention that would end up cradling my entire year:

This year, when given the opportunity, I will choose touch over tension, embracing rather than rejecting, joining in place of separation. I am not an emotional island, nor are the ones I love. I will choose to move towards them, even when it is hard.
I will choose to be with those that are in front of me.Every.Day.

And so now, here I am, shaking my head at the methods of a loving God who, in His desire to be close to me, reached across the gossamer veil and planted Love outright, deep within me. My One Word was more than just letters on a page. My One Word was born in me.

This past year has been a collection of giving over and giving in, of walking into and in front of. 

It has held fear, only to be bathed in faith. 

It has stretched, first, thin and then swelled gloriously ripe. 

It has challenged my hopes, changed my trajectory, and championed my spirit.

That little preposition of a word continued to show up. 

Every.

Single.

Day.

And so, here I am again, on the cusp of a whole new chunk of days and, once again, I am choosing One Word.

weave

verb

-to make (cloth) by interlacing the threads of the weft and the warp on a loom.

-to interlace (threads, for example) into cloth.

-to construct by interlacing or interweaving strips or strands of material

-to interweave or combine (elements) into a complex whole

-to contrive (something complex or elaborate) in this way

-to introduce (another element) into a complex whole; work in

-to spin

The Free Dictionary

This word came to me in the hushed gray of morning this past week. My little Samuel, the very answer to a question I didn't even know that I had asked, the single greatest surprise of my life, was stirring. I peeked, sleepily, at the boy miracle within arm's reach and it hit me: 

I have a crazy beautiful life. 

So much poignant beauty has wound its way into each moment. The gray and the blue woven in tight with the yellow and the orange, in and out, over and under.

Each day is cut from holy cloth, bolts of glory by the yard.

And I want to remember this, for always. Because this is no small thing. In fact, this is a very grand thing. The greatest thing, even. 

So, I am choosing WEAVE as my One Word for 2014.

I want to interlace myself with each member of my sweet little family, in and out, over and under, creating beautiful patterns of light and dark, soft and scruffy, bold and demure. I want to recognize each individual for the uniqueness they bring to our clan, all the while, remembering that they are also part of a complex whole creation that is continually emerging, growing, changing.

I want to apply this to my other relationships, as well. I want to receive those that have been planted in my life and first see, really see, all the color and texture and gifts that they bring to the table. Then, after acknowledging that who I am is such a conglomeration of these people, we can go about the business of braiding ourselves together, in and out, over and under.

And then there is the writing, whose very act is a gathering, a stringing together of thought and hope and belief. 

To write is to weave, all the while, hoping and praying that in all of this straw gathering there will be flickers of gold.

So, I am extending a warm and open "Welcome" to this new year. I know that to do so is risky. There is no guarantee that 2014 will be kind to me. If this past year has taught me anything it is that the flip side of light is dark, the opposite of health is sickness, and the antithesis of security is uncertainty. But I am not going to let fear set the tone for what is to come. Instead, I am going to join hands with the Giver of gifts and, together, we are going to take warp and weft and weave beauty.

“For last year's words belong to last year's language 

And next year's words await another voice.” 

--TS Eliot

Photo credit: Flickr

Spinning Straw Into Gold

This last week before Christmas has taken on a life of its own this year.

Right when my sweet little family was gearing up for afternoons baking cookies and evenings driving around town gazing at twinkling lights we had to, instead, quickly shift gears, rearrange plans, throw clothes in suitcases, make haste. Suddenly, it was all about hustle—a verb that I fight with a vengeance during this holy season. But rather than it being about needing a little Christmas, right this very minute, it was a pressing need to get home.

My mom is, once again, fighting a battle with her body. Cancer thinks it deserves space in her bloodstream and it is acting like a big old bully. I hate cancer.

But, I figure, the best way to fight a bully is with love so my little family has slipped on our boxing gloves and we intend to go down punching. For we want to be known as people who love. We have shown up on my parent’s doorstep, even if there is but little room in the inn, and we are ready to do business.

It is Christmas time, though, and there are children here so I am trying to figure out how you patch together something that still sings of grace and glory while not ignoring the present reality. How do we take the straw we’ve been handed and spin it into something golden and magical?

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Would you like to read the rest of this post?

I am writing over at SheLoves Magazine today. Follow this link to find the rest of my words.

Lessons in Light and Dark

It happened so fast, the light leaving.

It was a slow fade, at first, with the late afternoon sun casting weaker beams in the sky. And then, like a candle snuffed quietly, the sun disappeared and one day we found ourselves eating dinner in the inky blackness. That first darkened night we huddled around the table and felt a keen need to draw closer, to touch shoulders, to clasp hands.

The hushed darkness of winter will do that to you. Pull you in.

And although the earth spins faithfully and the calendar responds in turn, even though I know this cycle by heart, I am still surprised by its steadfastness. The resoluteness of time can grate painfully across this fickle heart of mine and my grandest intentions often fall like cinders from the flame that frames each season.

The passing of years does not always equate an increased wisdom and some lessons wrap themselves in new skin and walk themselves into my days.

My latest lesson wears the skin of a baby...

To read the rest of "Lessons in Light and Dark" please join me here over at SheLoves Magazine.