this morning i woke singing "how great is our god" and dreaming of a widowed pastor's wife. The point of the dream, I think, was to hold on to and praise God even when things seem terrible. Not a new point, but one I apparently needed to be reminded of.

How great is our God.

Something Beautiful

MAYE TORRES

a few days ago my mom and i watched a documentary titled who does she think she is? Maye Torres was one of the artists chronicled in the doc. Listening to her speak and interact with her children was inspiring. And, her work is just ridiculous. This work is titled "Forming Wings." I like this one because of the progression in it--the bird turning into what I see as God's protective hands. Or maybe it's the transformation of the woman into her own protector/ascension.

Either way, beautiful. You can check out more from her at: http://www.mayetorresart.com/

Discord

"We have an awesome responsibility to remember who we are."

-Rev. Calvin Culpepper

today i am fasting. Each time my stomach growls I thank God for all They have done for me.

I'm not sure what I'm in the process of learning, honestly. It seems discordant, and there is no neat little bow to wrap it all up with. It's like a pile of clothes on the floor, and you don't know what's dirty and what's clean and you have no hamper to just shove it all into--and would you really want to mix it all together, if you could? That's what my brain is like right now.

I guess it comes down to responsibility. The responsibility of who we are, and the responsibility of living. There will always be things about me that I don't like--and there will always be a part of me that wants to point out those shortcomings to myself. I know I'm hard on myself. I've always been, and that's not likely to go away. So there's this part of me that, honestly, wants to bring me down. At the same time I honestly love who I am and have worked hard to become a woman I can be proud of. I've come to accept my mistakes as positive things--a professor in my undergrad said that "It's a mistake not to make mistakes." And that opened up worlds to me. If I'm not making mistakes, I'm not growing and moving forward. But then I want to beat myself up over mistakes. And round and round we go.

Add to that the responsibility of walking this earth, especially as a person of passion and faith. Who we are is a great responsibility. We are given life and breath and brains and minds. The choices we make will create waves and change the world's course. If the wings of a butterfly can cause a hurricane, then surely our daily actions can have an impact. Living actively and with purpose is a powerful thing.

On Sunday the reverend spoke directly to the discord I was feeling. There is a place in life where perception is splintered: between who we are and who we want to be, between our current life and the life we hope for.

Oswald Chambers says that when we encounter dismay, we need to live in it for a season rather than holding on to a better past or a brighter future. Dismay, Chambers says, is a discipline. We learn during these times. But, it's uncomfortable. Sitting with dismay was not my favorite thing to do.

I'm back to joyous thanks and excitement about the future. Still, with no resolve. Practicing living amongst discord.

Chasm

lent, day 2

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

-Anne Lamott

Today, I feel like the embodiment of this quote. My Utmost for His Highest talks about being living messengers of God, that we don't just tell about God's love but that God's love is, essentially, who we are. I don't know if this necessitates brokenness, but it feels like it.

Today I feel like I'm living in the chasm between who I am and who I want to be. It's not a comfortable place to live in. The process of Becoming isn't, really, a cake walk. (Remember those? I went to one at a fair when I was a child in North Dakota. I won a Black Forest with bright red cherries on top. It was delicious.) In a cake walk, you are certain to win. You know the outcome will be delicious cake. In actively living life, you don't know the outcome for the steps you take. And so many of my steps, in retrospect, appear seriously wrong. I am proud to have taken risks and made mistakes, but I can still feel the sting of the mistake. I think God wants me to live with this uncomfortableness for a while. And so I am. I'll be thankful to move forward from here, though.

(Photo by Emi Anrakuji)

Something Beautiful

as a part of lent, i'm finding something i find beautiful/inspiring every week and meditating on it. This week it's this:

Resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for it to kill your enemy.

-Nelson Mandela

In other words, forgiveness. Holding on to anger and bitterness only poison us, not those we're angry at. This idea of resentment/bitterness compared to poison has been around for centuries, I guess, but Mandela made it famous.

For the days before Ash Wednesday, forgiveness was the focus of my days. I think in order to do the 40 day personal Spring Cleaning of Lent, I'm going to have to go through layers of forgiveness. I'm trying.

Wednesday's Blog

t-shirt from zazzle.com

i want my life to be beautiful.

My mantra for at least the past decade has been: I want to be the best possible version of myself. Not perfect, but messy and passionate and constantly learning. Growing.

Along those lines, I'm observing Lent for the first time. At first, my goal for Lent was "To get my sh*t together." But I think my focus was wrong. So, I'm going to seek God--because when I seek God, my sh*t seems to gather itself together.

Today, Ash Wednesday, is a day for recognizing your mortality. Rather than sadness, I feel immense joy. Because while I come from dust and I'll return to dust, the life I live in between is going to be pretty kick *ss. There's freedom in realizing you only have one life, and that it will end. The pain isn't permanent. The mistakes we make as temporary humans, though they seem insurmountable to us, are chances for God to grow something beautiful. And though the joy isn't permanent either, it's the joy that reverberates through time.

I like to picture our lives on a spiritual plane. There's a whole realm operating at all times that we don't understand. I like to picture that realm in terms of light--our actions and thoughts that glorify God and serve others shine throughout time and space. Like those images of Earth from space at night, all the cities lit up so that you can see them even from space. As if each of those lights were people loving each other in real, active ways. Living a life whose light can even be seen from space.



I want to walk with God in a way that can be seen from distant galaxies.

"Showing no concern for the uncertainties that lie ahead is the secret of walking with Jesus." -Oswald Chambers