I really miss the habit of daily writing. It is good exercise for the soul.
I fear that my life has become full again, perhaps 'cluttered' is a better way of putting my concern. Cluttered seems more like the feeling you get when there is too much stuff around you, calling for your attention but difficult to decipher where the voice is actually coming from. I suppose some of this has to do with a normal ebb-and-flow of an active life, perhaps even a result of the annual seasons…like the Christmas one through which we just passed. But I suspect it is more than that. I miss the times of distinguishable clarity, when life and desire were simple…times during even the last two years when my awareness of need was daily, when resources were scarce in worldly terms and when the combination of the two left me regularly at the feet of God; seeking not only a way through the confusion of the unfamiliar path, but also a way to God himself. The clarity of desire aimed just simply at him, not even merely for His way, which still seems a bit self-serving, but just Him was palpable. Being with Him. Knowing Him. At the very least, wanting to.
Even as I write, I am reminded that we must just simply stop to hear Him, to find Him. Perhaps this is why this quote rings so true:
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system though which God speaks to us every hour; if we still only tune in.
-- George Washington Carver
We just must stop…stop ourselves. At least, I must. Perhaps one of the great favors of the last two years of my life was the grace God extended to me to stop my life for me, even as I couldn’t do it myself. …or wouldn’t. …or hadn’t learned to…yet. I now realize that I have just deep preference for a stopped life…a life with space to contemplate Him. And without it, this whispering space, I don’t recognize the many weeds of entitlement growing in my spirit again. I don’t see them as weeds, as I breeze by them with the watering can of activity clenched tightly in my hand. Things I want blossom into things I deserve. Things that are blessings along the way, somehow become how I try to find my way. Objects of truth become unflowerful. Objects of untruth distort themselves into eye-catching fancy. I become no longer tuned in to the objectivity of God’s natural broadcast and become mesmerized by the glitter of a flat-screen world.
Grow in me, oh God, only the seasonal flower…the one that takes the rest of the year to stem. Draw me to your fragrance and make the sticky sweet of falsehood more and more distasteful. Only You really satisfy…thank you for the reminder and give me the courage to reject a garden full of weeds and to reach not for the water-can of activity, but for your gardener’s hand instead.
