My friend, one of them, is like a sneeze. Whenever I call her, or she calls me, we get in the ring and box out what's rolling around in our spirits together. And the calls always come in threes; sneeze, sneeze, ahCHOO; because we sift through and let settle what we lay on the line and as we distill it down, each call seems to crystalize truth for ourselves into small diamonds we can put in our pocket. These times dig up my dry chunky places, my angry wells, they make me cry, they make me pitch a fit in my bones until I take a dry, heaving breath like after a child cries and crawl up in my Daddy's lap and sit clutching the truth, all crinkled construction paper, in my hand and He teaches me to cut it into the shape of a heart.
These things I grab up hungry inside of me, these life parts that I find lying about my path, and I want to shove them in my mouth crumbling out the sides and hope they fill me. I get so scared sometimes that I won't get enough, that somehow I'm the step child at the end of the table. I'm angry that He won't give me what I want and think I know what that is, in fact I'm sure that my veiled mind has it all figured out and I stamp my inner foot down hard at Him. What if I get something different than I asked for? Will I die from it? Maybe I want to die from it, to hold my breath till I go away. So, I gather up my trick or treat bag and go from here to there, collecting my thoughts and my panic and my inner obssessive and try to sew them into a map I can follow.
Then my friend calls; ahCHOO, and we paw through my bag. "Lemme see whatcha got, what you're carrying in there," she says to me and I unpack it and throw it at her like word bombs. She's silent on the other end, listening, because I'd told her to be quiet while I lobbed my grenades. "Here. Take THAT, life." As I machine gunned out my words I was on my knees, scrubbing a spot off the floor and I suddenly lost all my venom and it ran out of my eyes unguarded. "I'm tired. I'm just tired of feeling like the Cinderella who never gets asked to the ball. I feel like He always makes me ride around in a pumpkin," I sobbed, my grown up girl at her best.
"Are you through? May I talk now?" she asked me. "Uh huh," I sniff. "Have you invited your Daddy in?" There it was. All quiet. I sniffed again. There's an experiment I did with my kids years ago. A bowl full of water, pepper sprinkled on top. I'd take a toothpick and dip it in detergent and touch it lightly to the surface of the water and my kids would marvel as the pepper rushed to the toothpick and the surface of the water was clean again. That was my toothpick moment. Had I? I got off the phone and went to my Bible.
"Moses said, give me some time. I'll find out what God says in your circumstances." I looked up and towards the green chair where I sometimes picture Him sitting and smiled. I'd forgotten to ask. I'd forgotten to invite Him in.
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