Sojourn.....

Chords are struck on my guitar and my words flow after them. I sing. And the words lately pluck the unaltered chords of my own humanity. I sing from whatever my soul is needing to say. The words unrehearsed are "come and take me home". No matter how hard I try not to think about it, it seeps into me. It whispers to me. It shouts. This is not my home. God has made a place for me and the world and all its wonder and inner workings and waning is not it. My spirit inwardly groans to see God's face. And it's more than just wishing for a place like heaven it's a deep knowing that its actually there and yet I can't cross the threshold. Our culture so out of touch with the invisible God how he watches us toil and sin and laugh and rise in the mornings and rest at midnights. He keeps a vigil because God never sleeps. So he knows my longings and all the dark places in me and all the goodness he has made in me, he knows that I miss my home. The world can not understand this. But the world is subconsiously vitally aware of it. It plays out in stories. We hunger to know other worlds in fiction and in science. All the greatest stories ever told were of other places never visited. Most of us want there to be "something" else and "somewhere" else. Its not that death fascinates me, not at all it's that heaven does. And I pray knowing in my logical mind that the prayers are being heard by God in heaven and I think one day I will be seeing the God I'm praying too. Jesus said blessed are those who have beleived and not seen. I can only take hold of the word of God like boundry stones for my life.

Winding Down...

Lately, I sing my hallelujahs while the sun is winding down and the stars begin to shine their crowns. I sing em while the angels are singing theirs upon the steps near God's balcony. So the resolute trees I know and the stumbling sandstone mountains and oceanic skies thrum praises as the angels worship with us.
I've been sifting through Mere Christianity and I like his concept of time. C.S. Lewis believed that since God lives outside the realm of time that all our moments on earth are happening at once. Today is tomorrow for us in the eyes of God. Our days happening faster than flipping pages in a new book. Now this concept may take a moment to fall into your heart because we think time is as a steady unbinding thing as the silver working gears on a grandfather clock.
I guess I've been feeling the waiting and the longing. You know the waiting for the when you'll ever get there. To heaven or the next task or the next movement of your beating heart. It feels relative to poets and the prophetic in little moments I think. I'm becoming older the more that I breathe and I haven't accomplished what I would have wished in this life yet. I have loved and I have watched sunsets and I've known God. And I'm finding my map isn't God's for me. I have to trust that ordinary days are deeply meaningful that the trials and the pressing, the whispered prayers and all the simple glorious blessings I take for granted are God's destiny for my life. God binds me to himself and takes hold of me even as the devil tries to deceive me into believing I'm forsaken or forgotten or only ordinary. The truth is we are all more extraordinary than any of us could ever dream. God's love makes us significant and it is impossible for me to deny that.

The View From Here....

The hands of Jesus (I'll remind myself while Jesus reigns in heaven wrapped in that overwhelming glory) still hold the scars that have remained. They have remained when he met Mary in that non-descript garden as the lowly gardener finding her. He spoke her name while she wept at the sight of the thorns on all the stems of the colorful roses. And the scars remained after Thomas confessed his relentless doubt and then when he finds his faith in the creases of Christ's palms. Faith that bloomed like a flower. They remained when Jesus went into the depths and took the keys that were meant to free us and then when he walked on dusty roads giving his wandering friends wisdom about this Son of God/Man (this unlikey contridiction) they watched contain his extrodinariness on a hewn down cross. Even then The scars never left.

I'm sure that his hands still hold strength and kindness and the complete surrender of all my wanting. I don't walk in step with the rest of the world I'm more aware of this than I'd like to be. Its an out of step life, its a turn left life when everyone says you should turn right. I submerge myself in silence till someone asks the deeper questions. I'm not what the world wants but I am what God desires and that has made all the difference.

Pendulum

If you know me only a little even after reading these pages you'll know I have an abiding love for trees. Tall, silent great guardians in winter and summer bringing solace to me when I ever most needed it. Well...not the trees exactly but the end design of all my wanderings and walking and prayers and conversations in tune with God. The trees are a kind of connection between my heart and God and where my feet usually lead me by the time I'm finished talking or by the time God is finished talking to me. Strange how God will plant a certain affection for a singular tree that I'll admire in some singular fashion in different seasons of my life. Anyway there is this beautiful alighted tree near my friend's house I'll pass by so often. Its very tall and full of life and deeply beautiful. If things in this world are like pieces of well placed furniture in a house let that tree remain my armchair. So, the tree imagine is a most beautiful thing like joy you can open up in a box whenever you desire it just by laying your eyes on it.

And the other day I hear a sad true tale that unravels me from the core and renders me off balance. I think to myself how in congruent in life the bitter and the honey. I think to myself stupid beautiful tree and how it mocks me resting so peaceful on the same earth where Godlessness can ruin us. I pace back and forth from angry to sad. I swing like a pendulum for a day before resting in prayer. And I'm emotional and feeling dramatic about it but I'd loathe to turn cynical. Though there are those that would believe cynicism wisdom and kindness weakness. I pray...lead me to where God reigns...just lead me to where God reigns....

BluePrints....

Words drip and cascade and at times almost thunderlike roll out of me. Every day lately, I watch the drama of clouds serene or fantastical or carrying an ominous dark quality and I reflect on them as if I were a great painter. I walk into gardens of silver trees and fragrant hushed flowers and think about eden and wonder if the angels held any curiosity about this unbroken cord still guided from God to man. I remember a conversation with Bob about how this world and the reality of it is nothing but well placed furniture on a stage for God and us to move about in but Bob said it so much more elequiently than I. I'll lie in my room face buried in the floor and offer praise and ask for Christ's redeeming quality to fall on me. I seem to walk around with a fastidious energy that is calmed in the presence of God. I still try to paint whether the canvas rendered is any good at all just to endure and release some of this radiant passion. Perhaps I should leave it only for my words or let God direct it into higher goals. I pray about that too. I listen to music and read and work and write and love and keep to some sort of schedule. And after reading all this and compiling yet more words I think my fate is to always be creating and writing and pouring out. God willing the efforts will at least bring some peacefulness to God and man. Michelle says that our steps are ordered and that nothing will stop certain events in our lives. My blueprints reveal I'm to think in poetry and glory in walks of prayer in silent gardens.

Quote....

"Its a great madness feeling everything from the deep pools of dreams."


I had this thought after walking home yesterday. I went straight away and doused my hands in hues of blue paint and threw my madness down onto a canvas.

On a tightrope between dust and dreams....

I don't know why but I seem to write things here that are beautiful and cryptic. I'll talk about the older faded stories of my life as if they were once scattered dreams in a lost diary or describe a phoenix burst of emotion that I'm in the midst of raging through or walking on a cloud from. I have this tendency to view the world like an impressionistic painting. Thinking of color...illumination fascinates my soul. When I was in Manhattan a few weekends ago I sat with a fancy dinner underneath white table cloths and soft orange lights that made the blue and gold wine bottles on the bar glow like the hues in Picasso's Starry Night. A few hours before we had taken a wrong turn on the subway and ended up in a lovely Latin barrio. We passed a sunny park where a few old gentleman took out their conga drums and Spanish guitars and began singing. Kids spoke Spanish on the streets. We turned on the corner of an outdoor cafe where couples laughed and danced to live salsa music. Lovely memory. When I sleep at night my dreams are like half erased sketches to me. My grandmother is dying and I have to think about when my life will be living without her soon. She loves Jesus so completely. I send her cards in the mail and go home when I can to visit. I'll remember moments in time with her that have made parts of me...we'll me. How does that happen exactly and how does one forget and remember so easily? Today I remembered a boy I had forgotten from college I don't think I ever told anyone about. His name was Micah he was tall and thin with dark black lashes and curly hair. He was a christian and we talked about his name and the prophet it was taken from. He was creative and funny and I remember half way through the course realizing that he had one blue and one brown eye. I told him I hadn't noticed till then and he said he was a little self conscious about it but I remember thinking how unique and beautiful it made him look. How well it seemed to fit his character. I can't remember if I told him so or not. Funny thing what a day brings.

Cold Rush

Pluck at my bare heart like a chord from the silver strings of your sojourn guitar. You play it like its your lover's last song and sling the nature of your craft along your hip like the gypsy you are. My soul tastes the colors of stained glass windows and finds comfort in the silence of statues carved by sculptors muscled hands who chip away their life into stone. I'm a little restless surrounded by grey walls in the morning light and when the sun rises. Oh God come and speak to my impassioned nature. I want to dance in firelight and sing hallelujahs outside my door and paint with my hands and carve stone and walk closer to you than I did before. I want to speak to angels whom I know are there even though I don't see them. There is something beautifully longing in this heart and it feels like stars being born. Christ lives in this sinewy temple and I feel his freedom and his likeness resting inside. The hallelujahs don't ever seem to be enough but somehow they are. I have had these strange and powerful fleeting thoughts lately of joy and light and your love. As if you and I were drinking down the sun in a coffee cup and you say my name as if I'm you're only one...you're one and only and I think to myself I can do anything, anything at all if your winding up my clock or putting the wind in my sails or breaking down the door or whatever it is that you do so well. And I find it humbling and terribly strange.

Eclipse of God....

Whenever I go to church lately and stand and listen to notes rising up from the choir- notes out of the housed chests of men praising like hidden winged treasures in a sand dollar, these notes shatter my false illusions about this world.

I stood in the shadow of a long hallway once with only a sliver of light from a room the choir was practicing in. I was drawn too the praise as if an angel had guided my hand there. It seemed so late in the half light as I lifted up my voice too while we sang accapella on the other side of the wall between us. They practiced as I praised and I felt awash in it so much so I'm not sure how my feet carried me home that night.

But lately, at church my spirit so full of joy can not even seem to sing or make a sound at all. I can only seem to be thankful and weep near the alter so close to my shod feet. It happens that way feeling so close to the God who is no more only a reflection of the things that I see but is a part of them. Who is so near to me I feel I must move my breathe to a hushed and humbled "Amen" for the truth of it and there are times when all my spirit inside can do to acknowledge this truth is weep a little at it. At work a few weeks ago I had a conversation about how I felt about how I looked. I told them this..."I always believed I was beautiful no matter what other people believed or thought about me....because I know God created me, and if God created me then I am a part of God and he is a part of me and God is everything that is beautiful."

If heaven is like a man with buried treasure then I'm in for a pence and in for a pound.

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Getting the stars out of my head....

I get tangled up in thistled thorns and find myself walking through low burning brush fires. There is ash falling like snow as I move towards sun ripened gardens. And it feels like stars are bursting in the back of my brain somewhere. I beleive the universe marches with all the precision and elegance of a gilded pocket watch. Then symphonies start to comply as I walk past sparrows. I keep wishing I could ask Monet how he caught the light and wonder if I should dare put my hand to the same tasks. I can't draw anything so satysfying nor do I have the patience for the process of things. The smooth stone of a moon set last morning with an orange etherial glow. And I think I need to gulp down new words or worlds either would suffice. I keep putting my words on a pedastal but they keep falling back down on me. Dear God I've been writing letters with a heavy red wax seal on them did the Angels tarry them off to your door? Why the imagination and no map, sealed letter or telephone call to follow it up? I keep remembering reading to Karma in the hospital and John whom both cried at the beauty of my stringed sentences. I need a tool kit out here in the wilderness. Some direction and assurance would be greatly appreciated. Let me breathe in art and build something. I don't care about my little ducks being in a row anymore just speak to me.

Time and tea

I haven't written here partly because I liked my last post. I left you on joy. And partly because I've been busy. And partly because I feel like I keep saying the same things over and over again. 1. Events happen or don't happen or I choose x, y or z and cause events then I feel or think...(fill in the blank here). 2. God is aware of these events or caused these events and feels or thinks (fill in the blank here). Its almost comical.

I'm still working on my novel but these last few weeks my characters feel like a comic book creation and the story seems flat and two dimensional. I'm not saying these things are true its just how I feel about them right now (See premise 1). I struggle with some sin or other and then go back to Jesus about it after I've tired of the wrestling and quicksand of it then decide to pick up my cross and sacrifice the sin to God. I do this repeatedly. I visit friends. I visit family. I call or don't call friends or family. I get cabin fever. I crave adventure and freedom but stay dutifully at home, pet the cat and go to work. I desire to paint or write or kiss my husband all with the passion of a hurricane. So far I can't seem to write or paint. I did sit and draw whatever was in my minds eye the other night and came up with a twisted hand. I have strange dreams and find that I can interpret them lately. I get bored, I get somber, I laugh about the weather. I read the book of James and drank its spirit. Life moves at the pace of growing trees or melting snow or spilt shadows and it still seems to be moving too quickly. I miss Karma and coffee with Bob. I miss Amanda's singing. I want to make Kim laugh and my brother peaceful. My father knows God. And angels worship. I feel broken down and beautiful. I feel like I'm re-enacting a play I forgot my lines to.

Upswing

I cannot seem to stop singing while these winter days usher me towards spring and somehow praise rushes up and escapes from within the deepest recesses of my heart. I’ll be driving along in the car with my hands upon the wheel on cold bitter evenings and I’ll feel so alive and thankful and beautiful because I know God and I know God knows me. I’ll hum in the shower. At work I’ll want to sing out loud my own made up words in my own elegant tones even though I don’t because it’s the office. I have this light uplifting quality to my voice it’s not as rustic as it used to be. I feel as if I’m still trying to discover it. There seems to be a candle lit of joy inside me that’s lasting that I’m not able to contain. I cannot contain Christ no man can. I think how odd all this is in the world working when I want to praise, when in heaven won’t I want to just stop and praise him as my one singular purpose? He is my God and I am his people. I asked the Lord when I die and see him for the very first time with the scars upon his palms won’t I fall at the feet of Jesus and mingle my tears upon his transformed flesh. I’d take hold of his ankles and lay so still to the finer things of heaven till I’ve seen him for myself. I’d say what a strange dream my life was and how if ever I knew what home was, I certainly never knew it till now. And my life and all my grandiose dreams seem so fleeting in the eyes of Christ. Maybe I’m already doing what I was meant to do. Mother Theresa said something to the affect of there are no great things to accomplish in this life only small things with great love. I've had that mingled in my thoughts every day. So my prayers and this blog and my warm coat on a cold blustery day and kissing my husband goodnight are all a part of my double portion and blessing in this life and yours as well. I still dream of water and (I’m drowning in the ocean of God’s love) without even comprehending it. That’s a line from the David Crowder Band but that doesn’t make it any less true of the way that I feel about it. And on the news a young boy dowsed with kerosene and lit on fire by angered bullies and there is a mountain in Alabama where a city lies in the grip of a meth addicted community they call it “meth mountain” and leprosy still prevails in third world countries that can’t afford penicillin. And a young man loses twenty pounds in three months eating every three days because he shoots up coke ten times a day. My dreams of joy and God unfold in a world that’s dying. Maybe that small smile to a stranger, that reflection of Christ’s good will and mercy and joy and grace I attend to in life will manifest something of immeasurable importance to someone in need. You never know what people have gone through. I find it terribly strange the world and the spirit of God intermingled. He could have left us here on this violently struck island and yet he rests here still. He waits for us to bring him our brokenness and welcomes the muddied embrace. I remind myself that love is the nature of God. I remind myself that God is what remains.