There are times you live in the hidden nooks-n-crannies of your life, as if it were a shrinking back. But that’s not entirely true. It’s really a folding into your life. One that’s necessary and truer.
It may feel you stepped off the stage, as if you were an actor in a familiar bar. Yet, nobody knows your name anymore. Life grew smaller. And how does smaller grow? Yet you know it does, in it’s own backwards kind of way.
There are times you feel forgotten like a wild thing left to grow in the woods. Feelings can lie. Yet the mundane-ness that is life, distracts you in one little thing to the next. But they are not little. Not really.
In order to be in the here-n-now’s, you have receded to the small creases. Among the seams is the rhythm of your life or in the least, where you look for them. Change is inevitable. You aren’t fooled. But you try to watch for it. Try to diligently look for turning leaves of woe. Try to find and prune any straining branches. But the branches can catch you by surprise, rot suddenly, and fall to the ground.
That’s when the fast-forward life comes to a screeching halt. Normalcy (what is normal anyway?) gets stretched like an old VCR cassette, threatening to snap the brown tape that connects the reel to real needs. So you hit the “pause” button and become a mechanic of details.
“This can not be overemphasized: your plight is also your redemption.” Dan B. Allender, PhD from To Be Told.
Slowing down is hard in a fast world.
When everything and everyone seems to be spinning off to grander things, it takes courage to preserve in smallness. To guard it with your life. Many days it feels just that–a sacrifice exacting your life.
Among the tending of relationships, there’s the delicate care of little people with raging hormones big enough to knock over a buffalo. You are right where you’re supposed to be. There’s the tattered friendships which cause you to press a hand against the wall of grace to steady yourself. You’re here to heal. Or fill in your own blank. You’re here to save your life, being what it is right now.
Perhaps, in the vegetable aisle between the Red Lettuce and Cilantro, you hide for one lone minute. Perhaps, you look around your life and wonder what God is doing with it. But you are not hidden. He sees every hair on your head and clothes the fields for you.
In your inside-out life, in this tiny way, is vulnerability and a slight nagging of insecurity. “What if I never measure up to those dreams I once had? Where does this kind of living lead? How do I help my little people breath when engulfed by a fire-y world? How do I?” The questions can press to the point you want to sleep all the live-long day. But in order to hear answers and learn how to be defined by the Spirit inside you, it takes quieting the noise around you. The silence can be deafening.
So much so, you question the crease-ful living. You want to be a garment clothing the world around you. Or a shiny pair of boots taking people places. Or a blacksmith working with unruly metal to make beautiful and useful things, like shaping words one alphabet at a time.
Silence greets you instead.
So you learn. You learn to listen to how nothingness settles like an empty vacuum of rest. Maybe you should be running. It feels that way. But you choose to enjoy every small morsel. The quiet folds making this a good life at the moment.
You want to apologize. Really you do. But the benefits from your small living keep you from it. Besides, you have a race but where does it ever say at what pace? Why sprint your whole life? Why run at all?
Why not walk? Take time to savor it.
There’s always tomorrow worrying about itself. Today, however, is small and glorious and ridiculously slow. And it’s here you muster the courage to live in the small creases of it.
The world marvels at such things. But you hardly notice.
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May 19, 2015
Tammy,
Each time I rest a while with you here, I am refreshed. It is like you are looking through the jagged mosaic of my heart and seeing visages of stories that capture my memory box of thoughts. I appreciate the way you do that and remind me to keep moving forward even when the world doesn’t see what He is doing, He is our most important audience.
Bless you!
Dawn
May 19, 2015
Dawn, sometimes we are just blind as bats as to what He’s doing. That’s when we pat the wall of that dark cave and hope we find His hand. 🙂
May 19, 2015
Oh Tammy, Be Still. This is where we know for sure God is God. He’s germinating something in you now. Don’t discount the work because it’s underground. I’m watching and waiting and praying with you.
May 20, 2015
Monica, you are such an encourager. Thank you, friend.
May 19, 2015
Tammy – I just loved this. So many wonderful thoughts and quotes that encouraged me this evening. Thank you!