Healing

The evenings have been mixtures of salt tears and bewildered prayers. Even the mornings lost their refreshing light for a bit, they just brought the unwelcome news of another day. Suspended between an end and a beginning, I waited. There were bits of joy and sunshine in between, but it was not a season of brightness. It was a season of stillness, facing the silence of doubts, pain, and hopes.

I waited.

And as I did and walked around with stumbling steps, something changed. A brokenness just permeated into every aspect of my life. And I waited and prayed for the calm sunshine of healing grace. It didn't come. And somewhere between tears and headaches, eventually I came to a realization. The equivalence of healing and brokenness. This time healing didn't come in gentle rays, it came as brokenness. God's love was - is still - healing me with this pain. This season of stillness, as much as I do not and cannot understand it, is part of His sanctifying love.

The Love that moves the sun and the other stars...

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Travel Dreams

I love looking through my Mom's old pictures. Today, I spent time scanning some of them into the computer. My Mom has traveled everywhere...

Rome

Greece

Israel

Spain


France

Austria

Venice

Florence

And she has the best stories. They always make me want to travel.

Anyone want to run away to Europe with me?

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Monday Mornings

There's nothing inherently beautiful about this morning. Actually, it's almost the opposite. I can see cold skies from my window with telephone wires cutting the gray expanse into neat pieces. I can hear the muffled tones of siblings plodding through their morning routines. It's not a quiet morning. It's definitely not a peaceful morning.

But all the same, I love it. Charlotte Brontë once described her book (Shirley) as, "Real, cool, and solid... as unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves."

I love her description. And I love Monday mornings.

Because even if they are unromantic, there's a beauty to these Monday mornings that rivals the glory and warmth of other days. It's the beauty of the mundane. Sometimes, everyday life isn't exciting, it isn't like movies with stunning effects and breath-taking plots. Sometimes, everyday life is just like Monday mornings. Real, cool, and solid. And there's something comforting about the mundane, it is something always within our grasp, always near us.

And then, as we really come to appreciate the mundane, I think it changes, or at least, our perspective changes. And we come to see that the mundane is not just the mundane, it's sanctified. No longer do we "just" live on earth, we live on the world that our God walked upon. The Fall has been reversed by the Risen One, the mundane is sanctified, and we live in the light of that glory. And that is the beauty of the mundane - the everyday seen in the light of eternity.

Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty too.

(Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron)

Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world, but through it.

(Father Robert Capon, The Supper of the Lamb)

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