Echo

It seems I haven't listened to the echo of my thoughts in awhile. I've been in motion moving, doing, going. And every time I've looked at this blog I've felt that I haven't had anything better to say than my last posting. My thoughts and emotions seem a bit of a jumble to me. I feel quixotic and yet the pull of different directions tugging at the sleeve of my soul. I'm listening to U2 it seems appropriate with the hum of the jostling heart beat rhythm ringing in my ears and it feels good. I practice my guitar, I write and sometimes I sing. And it seems to move my visions forward. It seems to move me forward. I am content with my creativity for once. I seem to think in terms of God's time table. I remember saying once when I was deeply sad "I'm wasting God's time being sad and not doing anything productive." He wisely said "It's God's time to waste isn't it? You need to learn to be". So I think I'm more comfortable just "being" than I ever have. I go to the movies and sit in the dark alone and I don't mind. I never did mind. I can envision my stories up there flickering against the light and the darkness for once. I do ordinary things like laundry, dinner and tying my shoes. I feel fragile and sad once in awhile. I'll still have a day sometimes were I become nervous and tremble. I don't like it when it happens but I endure. I still worry about different things in my life I can't control and doubt God's love or faithfulness. But I find that is only human. God is still God and heaven, I know, is too real. I struggle with my sin and ask for forgiveness in the darkness. I'll pray in the mornings and thank him for things like clean water and bread. I laugh over little things and that feels bright and clean and good. My friends are deeply kind and true and that gives me immeasurable joy. And Cliff is a gift. I love the line of his shoulders and his laugh. I'm waiting for summer so I can find my fields again.

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.