The white Christmas lights that I keep up year round, just because their light makes me happy, are glowing warm tonight in my otherwise dark kitchen. It's been raining for hours. The trees outside look sad because they don't have their leaves yet, but I know growth is happening on the inside of them. He promises that. My girl is in the next room crocheting a blanket from a bag full to the brim with balls of yarn, like multi colored scoops of ice cream. I have my music playing in my ears, singing me truth lullabies as I write. "I'll love You with everything.....Hear I am, Lord; all I am, Lord." haunts me and I play it back over and over. Faces of people I know and love, their stories, weave their way in and out of those words like disonant chords. It squeezes my heart and I find my eyes filling with tears. It hurts to sing that, God. Some of us, most of us? We got nothing to give You but what already hurts.
I start to sing the song out loud to God, and close my eyes to imagine what He had, what He still has in mind for us. We are a wounded, raggedy lot, the bunch of us. And we gather around together to warm our hands a bit and somehow find love and hope and the courage to believe again, or for the first time, that our stories mean something. The notion that "breath and sex and sight" can be pulled out of the mud and made new and beautiful and sacred; that they are gifts this side of the veil, to give us a light that points to Him, fills our lungs with clean oxygen and sets us upright to dance again; it makes me throw back my head and open my arms wide to take it all in.
I ask Him to hold us tight, to wash off the dirty tear trails on our faces. I ask Him to help us trust Him again, or more, even when nothing makes sense. And He? He invites us to slow dance with Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment