Shedding

Coco is shedding her winter coat in great, black clumps that glob onto the living room carpet and blow like tumbleweeds under the kitchen’s ceiling fan.  Twice a day now, we are vacuuming our rugs, emptying the canister between runs, watching matted dog hair and dirt drift into the kitchen trash.

In the evenings, after work, I change into old clothes and call her out onto the front porch.  We both sit on the wooden floorboards and I pull our dollar store pet brush slowly through her wooly black curls.  

It’s satisfying and soothing all at once, the way I imagine brushing a horse must be.  When the brush is full, I pull the clumps off, gathering a growing pile to mark my progress, my accumulated success.  

Tonight, I cornered our tomcat, Blackie in the green grass and gave him a good brushing too.  He took it with equal parts purring and complaint. 

A friend admitted awhile back, after her elderly dog died, that she was elated to be freed from the extra mess – she would not be getting another dog.  I know, for a lot of people, pet hair is reason enough to refrain from ownership.  My own mother battled dog hair with a broom and dust pan, like she was battling the devil itself.

It does bother me – the hair, the dirt, not to mention the litter box’s stinking mess.  But, still, I know those few minutes each evening are some of the best of my day – some of the purest, the simplest - stroking and gathering, shedding what no longer serves. 

Communion (A Seminarian's Perspective)

During Seminary, another student and I, interned at a tiny, historic, Methodist church in New Jersey.  She was Methodist, I was not; but we were both welcomed into the fold in equal measure. 

The congregation was small and aged and the thing they appreciated most about the few sermons I gave was how well they could hear my voice and how clearly I enunciated.  The thing I appreciated most about preaching there was how the cleric’s robe covered me from head to toe, obscuring my feminine figure, rearranging me into a blank slate of black polyester.  Only my flat, tan shoes and the bottom of my dress pants showed and only then when I stepped out away from the pulpit, which was not often. 

My fellow intern, a heavyset single girl, shorter than me and rounder, also wore the robe while speaking.  On other Sundays, though, she dressed to the nines in strappy dresses with tight waists and full skirts like the ones housewives are pictured wearing in magazine ads from the 1950's.  She completed the look by pairing the dresses with impossibly high heeled shoes, the height and skinniness of which, caused her to teeter and totter precariously.

She didn’t seem at home in those dresses and matching shoes and I wondered why she wore them.  But I also probably didn’t seem at home in my drab business-casual attire that I’d purchased specially for the internship and possible future interviews.  Neither of us, I guess, were entirely at home in ourselves or our pastoral positions, which I suppose is the plight of many an intern.   

The small church was traditionally built, with old wooden pews and a long center aisle that led to a kneeling rail and altar.  Each service began with a processional from the narthex, down the center aisle, to the altar where candles were lit while the organist played. 

One of my most distinct memories of that church is of watching my fellow intern make her wobbly way down the carpeted center aisle with a plate of communion bread in hand.  The plate was wide, flat and loaded with bits of bread and she was so precariously perched in her heels that I felt for sure she was going to wipe out at any moment, scattering the body of Christ across the dense carpet.  I held my breath as she mounted the altar’s two steps and exhaled when she finally set the plate down. 

Having grown up Baptist and turned Anabaptist, the rituals of the Methodist church were foreign to me and struck me as overly formal.  I longed for something more personal, less prescribed.  I imagined with equal measures of horror and delight, what it would be like if she simply dropped the whole plate.  Some part of me longed for the broken body to spill, even just once; for us all to have to deal with the sudden beauty, the surprise of Christ spread among us in such an earthy, unscripted way.  

My colleague never dropped the host, but crumbs did often fall as we handed the bread to the congregants kneeling along the rail.  No matter how rigidly we try to contain him, Christ is always breaking through.  Mercy and grace scatter everywhere like crumbs, and who we are and who God is, is always being revealed.  Christ is always spreading out in our midst, disrupting our scripted ways, like the beige shoes and dress pants of a young woman sticking out beneath her robe, like a young woman in a flared out dress and heels making her wobbly way up the aisle, truth that cannot be hidden or disguised. 

Love That Carries

He's tall and burly, like someone who played football in high school.  Gray-haired, with some extra weight around the middle, he carries his daughter to school wrapped in a blanket every day through the long winter months.

I saw him this morning, as I do most mornings, walking back toward home as I waited in the drop-off line with my van-full of kids.  He walked down the sidewalk toward me with the now empty blanket draped casually over his shoulders.  It looked to be a quilt made of the sort of colors that bring to mind a Winnie the Pooh motif, a baby blanket, maybe.

Most days, I've noticed him, and most days I've thought, "Really, you carry her?"  There's part of me that still thinks it's a bit much - his daughter's in first grade at least - but today I saw it differently. 

Today I recognized the value - the depth - of a love that carries.

Grown men don't often walk around with baby quilts draped over their shoulders, but this one does, and as I write I'm reminded of those pictures of Christ the good shepherd walking with a lamb draped over his shoulders.  In those pictures that lamb is you, is me, is us - we who're being carried, wrapped in those incarnate arms of love.  

I wonder whether his daughter will even remember the way she was carried each frosty, breath-catching morning.  Maybe she won't and certainly a day will come when she says, "No more."  But slow-dancing in the kitchen with one of my bitty-boys on my hip, his head tucked into my shoulder, I know the truth, that being held, being carried, shapes us deep within in ways that can never, ever, be forgotten.

Love is Vertigo (a falling, floundering thing)

(Photo Source)

(To celebrate my new web page and in honor of Valentine's Day, I'm re-sharing some old posts this weeks focusing on the topic of love.  Today's post was shared on Valentine's Day 2013. Stop back tomorrow for another look at the many ways love finds us.)

I turned to see my two and four year old children driving their yellow, battery-powered, Corvette through our small, cramped living room.  I stood in the doorway between rooms, interviewing a potential babysitter, nanny when I looked up to watch her watching them drive by.  We were in the process of moving our older two out of daycare and hoping to hire someone to provide care in our home – the news that I was pregnant had finalized the decision. 

The incredible discovery that we were expecting twins had turned our world on its head the week before and, as I stood there talking, it still felt to me that our world was tilting, spinning out of control.  In that moment, the picture of our children driving through the house in a car that took up a third of the length of our living room struck me as both absurd and entirely appropriate. 

It was then that I knew we had fallen or were falling, though toward what I did not know.  The incline was steep and the sensation would not end, still has not ended, even now some two years later.  What I could not understand then that I do now is that what we were falling into was love, a deeper and wider love than we knew was possible.   

*   *   *

When I started dating the man who would become my husband, we would sit on opposite sides of the college cafeteria with our different groups of friends and make googly eyes at each other from across the room.  Whenever our eyes met there was a spark of electricity that spanned the distance and threatened to throw us off of our chairs if we didn’t glance away with speed. 

Later, when he studied in Oregon for a semester and I traveled out to visit, we spent an evening in Portland exploring, but all I remember is sitting together on a bench in the midst of the city.  I looked into his eyes, two deep and gentle brown pools, and felt myself falling, head-long, heart over heels.

*   *   *

When my daughter, my oldest, was born after months of waiting and reading, planning and anticipation, they placed her in my arms and I looked into those small dark eyes and felt a sudden and surprising moment of recognition.  It was an aha moment, a coming home and we sank into each other like two lost souls, like two lovers clinging as we plunged into life together.  I fell hard, as I have for every baby since.

*   *   *

Recently, I interviewed yet another babysitter.  The moment she walked in the door, my four year old pulled her into the hallway to see our new climbing wall. 

“A climbing wall . . . in your hall,” she said, “interesting.”  

I felt the same old sensation, the realization that we had fallen, are falling still, head-long into our love for these lives that have sprung up among us.  We are off-kilter, leaning hard into love and our home and our hearts are showing the expansion, the wear-and-tear of it all. 

Love, my friends, is a falling, floundering thing.  To love another, to be in and for love, is to consent to live continually off-balance.  Love is a leaning, plunging leap, a heart-pounding lunge that leaves your stomach in your throat and the only danger is that we would come to prefer the safety of solid ground over this sensation of continual plummet. 

To me, this is the only way to explain God coming to live among us, God looking, leaning down toward humanity.  God so loved the world that he leapt and fell in among us and in his falling for us he freed us from the fall, for the fall, and the taste is born in us for love – for leaping, falling, floundering, foolish love.

Christmas morning 2010, the Corvette we found for $25 on Craigslist.

Sitting in the Corvette, watching Bob the Builder.

Winter Blues: I Want to Seek, I Want to Find

Christ in the Wilderness - Consider the Lilies by Stanley Spencer

The trees hold tufts of snow, cold, white, cotton balls lifted toward a pale blue winter sky.  Yesterday I painted three canvases.  I have no idea what I’m doing, paint-wise, but bold strokes of citrus green and bright magenta seem to help with these mid-winter blues. 

I could spend all day playing hide and seek with the black clumps of pet hair scattered across the floors of this old house, all day washing cups and bowls, corralling books into baskets and bins.  And in the end, someone with a stroke of genius will scatter paper, pens and tape across the carpet, we will read more and more and books will fall across the furniture like snow, the dog will shed endlessly.   

But whatever I paint green today will be green tomorrow, that much I know for sure.

//

It feels as though I missed the train for Lent this year.  No bold post proclaiming my intent, no quiet reflection inviting deeper reflection yet.  Fat Tuesday came and went and the only ashes I saw on Wednesday were the ones I spread across the iron stove's belly, the ones I sweep daily from the hearth.  

I heard some murmurings online this year, from various quarters, about the practice of lent - certain groups reminding themselves, "We don't do Lent, that's for Catholics."  Someone else pointed out that Lent, in French, means "slow" and another focused on the Lenten call to wilderness living, the motion of removal and return modeled in the life of Christ.  

That's a lot to ponder and I could add my own unformed thoughts to the crowd, but instead this morning I'm leaning over a brown canvas outlining flowers first in pencil lead, then acrylic.  A voice on one shoulder reminds me I don't know how to paint, but in front of my eyes my hands create stroke by stroke a bright pink zinnia.  As I work another voice whispers about the flowers, how their beauty is enough, how their impermanence does nothing to denigrate the gift of being.  

//

This morning I'll take our black tom cat to the vet.  He's been acting strange this week and his breath could knock a giant flat.  I don't know if there's anything really wrong with him, but he's been jumpy and bossing the dog around in a way none of us appreciates. 

Do cats get cabin fever?  

I don't know, but the other day, with a plate full of bright magenta paint and that big, black cat standing nearby I was tempted to dip his paws in.  I stopped myself just in time.  

//

The bible doesn't tell us exactly why Jesus went into the wilderness, only that the "Spirit drove him out."  For forty days he watched the birds, the flowers, the trees and streams.  The stars unfolded their blanket across the sky before him each night, while the mother birds tucked their chicks into bed.  

That's the Christ I'm looking for these days - the one who watched the flowers bloom and fade, who baked fresh caught fish over coals turning to ash.  Christ who bent to draw in the dust with his finger, who saw the word of God in the way a tree grows and watched the foxes tumble from their dens as evening fell.  

This is the Christ I journey with this year, my canvases and brushes tucked under one arm, my cat and his vile breath under the other.  I want to seek and find the wonder of this world like Christ did, the wonder that both is and is waiting to be, like strokes of paint on the tip of the brush, like the quiet seeds sleeping beneath this melting snow.  

I want to seek.  I want to find. 

       

The Social Mores of Gerbils and its Impact on Biblical Interpretation or Something Like That . . . (#SmallWonder)

Teaching is the closest I get to extroversion, which explains why I (a fierce introvert) bottom out after every class.  When it’s going well I have a sense of flow.  Connected to the materials I’m presenting, I start to scat a little like a jazz singer, making free-associations, building and linking ideas together.  Sometimes this involves funny stick figure drawings on the blackboard, other times not. 

One day the other week I was trying to explain the incredible social divides bridged by the early house churches.  Referencing I Thessalonians I listed, “prominent women, Greeks, Jews and Gentiles” on the chalkboard.  

“These people wouldn’t normally have anything to do with each other,” I said, drawing a circle around the list. 

The class of Sophomores stared back at me, listless, silent. 

I felt like Eugene Peterson describes in his bible study session that led, eventually, to his ground-breaking gift of The Message translation,

          Galatians, Paul’s angry, passionate, fiery letter that rescued

          his congregation from their regression into culture slavery,   

          was on the table and nobody was getting it.  Sweetly smiling,

          they were giving more attention to stirring sugar into [their]

          Styrofoam cups than to the spirit words that pulsed in Paul’s

          metaphor’s and syntax.  It was obvious they weren’t getting

          it. (in Eat This Book:a conversation in the art of spiritual

          reading, p. 133)

“Putting these groups together,” I said, “would be like filling a whole room with cats and dogs.” 

But no, that example wasn’t exactly right. 

Pausing, I looked off into the distance just above the tops of my student’s heads, as I listened, inspiration came winging and landed on the tip of my outstretched mind.

“No,” I said, “you know what it’s like?”  Excitement grew in my voice.  “It’s like putting two gerbils in the same cage.  We got my son a gerbil for Christmas, then my daughter wanted one so badly we got her one too a few weeks after the first.  But, apparently, gerbils are highly territorial.  Introducing two gerbils from a different litter’s an incredibly complicated process.  So we built them a joint, but separated cage so they could get used to each other’s scent and share space without being able to fight.  But, the other day, one of the gerbils climbed over the divide and by the time we got there, the bigger gerbil had bitten off the smaller gerbil’s tail.  The little gerbil was running all around dragging her bloody stump behind her.”

“It was one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen,” I finished, with obvious delight.

The students were definitely listening now.  Many had their faces twisted, heads tipped to the side, in a questioning manner. 

“Well,” I added, backing off a little, “I guess the people in the early church weren’t biting each other, but . . .” then I paused again as a whole new wave of inspiration struck.

“Oh my gosh!” I added.  I was nearly shouting, “That’s exactly how Paul described it in one of the epistles.  ‘Stop biting and devouring one another,’ he tells them.  Yes, it IS like putting two gerbils in a cage.”

I remember memorizing that particular phrase from Paul’s letter to the Galatians as a high school bible quizzer, but a good twenty years passed between memorization and comprehension.  Those words floated in the cells of my brain like dandelion fluff, letters representing ideas until one day, in front of a classroom of thirty-three students, a concrete physical association caused them to take root and blossom into what Eugene Peterson describes as a “pop of delight.” 

Words took on flesh, ideas became image, a word picture was formed and I was so happy, so delighted.  We moved on then to the next topic at hand, but I carried that little “pop” of pleasure with me and feel it still today. 

May this joy – the joy of discovery, of unexpected connection and its accompanying wonder – be yours as you journey through each of your days.  No thing is too small, too trivial, too removed, to reach in and open the door of your heart.  

*   *   *

Welcome to the #SmallWonder link-up.

What if we chose to deliberately look for the small moments of wonder, the small sparks of presence, of delight or sorrow, of true humanity in which we meet God? 

That's my proposal - that we gather here each week to share one moment of Wonder from each of our days.  

You're invited to link-up a brief post about a small moment of wonder.  Don't worry if your post is too long, too short, or not just right - you're welcome to come as you are.  

While you're here, please do take a look around and encourage at least one other blogger with a comment.  

Some Mornings (An Advent Poem)

Photo Source: Picture from: B. Monginoux / Landscape-Photo.net (cc by-nc-nd)

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down . . . Isaiah 64:1

Some mornings the mountains 
disappear completely, a great
wall of white cutting the distance
between presence and sight.

Maybe this is what Isaiah saw,
this barrier and, like a lover maddened
by desire, he cried out without thinking, 
"Tear open the heavens and come down!"

Isaiah burned with longing, 
his coal-singed lips tingling and God,
whose passion simmers long and low,
was slowly aroused by the pining of his people. 

God came forth as a tiny seed
conceived by earth's desire,
born in the rending wide 
of heaven's door.  

Who Needs Your Mess?

This is not my laundry pile.  But it could be . . . if you multiplied what's here times three.

Her house wasn’t just small, it was tiny. 

The shower was quirky and a litter box sat behind a curtain in the bathroom. 

The kitchen wasn’t much more than a hallway and we met outside seated in a variety of plastic and canvas camp chairs. 

What I mean to say is it wasn’t fancy. 

I’d never been to a writer’s retreat before, so I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but these were things I noticed.    

I want to say it didn't matter, but it did.   

The little bits of mess and imperfection were some of the main things I carried away from the weekend.  Her mess was a gift to me and rather than being overwhelmed, I drove home thinking, maybe I could do that too.  Welcomed into the REAL of her life, litter box and all, I found the gift of freedom from perfection. 

//

Six months later I invited my new writer friend to lead a retreat at my house. 

My house isn’t tiny, but it does have litter boxes in conspicuous places and the shower isn’t just quirky, it’s dirty.  Participants sat in secondhand Ikea furniture and lined up on an old leather couch I’d dragged off the side of the road a week before.  I can’t tell you how many times I thought of my friend and her gracious example in the days and weeks leading up to the retreat, how much I clung to the gift of freedom she gave.

// 

Tonight I’m welcoming a group of seven people to our house for a brief workshop.  Some are complete strangers, others good friends, but only one has ever been inside our house before. 

Some will sit around our dining room table, the one we bought on Craig’s List and I’ll do my best to make sure the hardened remains of a month’s worth of meals are duly scraped away.  Others will line up in plastic folding chairs (thank you Target clearance) along a plastic table which will be oddly placed in the winter room.  I will write with broken bits of chalk on our handmade black board.  I’ll do my best beforehand to de-clutter surfaces, sweep the kitchen floor and clear a pathway through the mudroom. 

But the laundry will still be piled high on the washer and dryer, the litter box will sit ramshackle in the corner.  The kitchen ceiling will still be peeling and the ceiling fan’s blades lined with greasy dust.  Paint will be chipped in various places and the record player my husband had to buy will sit in a heap of records in the corner. 

There’s only so much I can do.  Only so much I can ask my family to do. 

But when I look at the mess, the glaring imperfections staring me in the eye, I think of my friend and the gift her mess was to me.  Maybe it’s enough to do something well in the midst of your mess.  And maybe someone will leave here tonight thinking, “I could do that too.”    

Next time you have someone over, try to worry a little less about your mess, maybe it will be a gift to someone who needs freedom from perfectionism.  Maybe, even, it will be a gift to you. 

My friend, Andi is a writer, editor and writing teacher and hosts a number of amazing events on her property, "God's Whisper Farm."  She also runs an online writing group on facebook.  I only dare write about her "mess" because I know she knows I love her!  Maybe I'll see you at her retreat next year?

Emptied and Humbled

You hollow us out, God,
so that we may carry you,
and you endlessly fill us
only to be emptied again.
Make smooth our inward spaces
and sturdy, that we may hold you
with less resistance
and bear you 
with deeper grace.
 
- Jan Richardson
 
It's Christmas Eve morning.

The cats are tearing back and forth through the living room, jumping over the couches via the computer.  Broken ornaments cover the carpet, the corners and a bright silver angel's wing lays on the hardwood floor.

I guess this is how it is.

Things fall down, get broken and we're riding into Christmas on the white water rapids of chaos.

We're down to one red bottle of antibiotics in the fridge, but every night is split still, not with angel choirs and shining stars, but coughing and cries of "Me need go potty!"  

Every morning I brace both hands against my side, stifling sneezes and coughs, gasping in pain as even the weakest of jolts causes what feels like a broken rib to spasm.  The doctor says it's a virus that's settled in the connective tissue of my ribs causing inflammation.  

Really?  

She sent me for an x-ray anyway and on Christmas Eve's eve I stood in a thin white gown, shivering and leaning against the cool white screen while the machine looked through to the very bone and gristle of me.

Will those x-rays show that I threw my son's breakfast out that morning after a bit of sass and told him he needed to make his own?  Is there some spot, small and gray, that reveals the grief of my Grandmother's passing, the memories of individually wrapped cut-out cookies she mailed at Christmas time? 

It hit me yesterday - I had somehow come to expect this Christmas would be different.  Last year, living in a grim apartment, we didn't expect much and the day was great, we made-do and were surprised by grace.  

But somehow, in a new house, with the kids a little older this year, I guess I gave in to that old illusion that maybe we could somehow rise above the chaos that is our every day, by which I mean to say, the house might be a little more tidy, the children a little less demanding, my body a little less failing.

The kids are clamoring now to wake up and the cat is breaking one last silver ball.  The angel's wing shimmers still in the lamp light.  Soon they'll descend the stairs and it will be what it will be - a messy, sometimes happy, sometimes sad kind of human holiday.

If angels appear, if light shatters the darkness, it will not be of our own making.  It will be because we've dropped the pretense, kneeling to clean, to hug, to read and wait together - emptied, like Christ, humbled. 

Impossible (Advent Week 4)

The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1897

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”  But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.  The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”  Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”  The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.  And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.   For nothing will be impossible with God.”  Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.     - Luke 1:26-38

I don't have any new words, friends, for this old, old passage seems too full of light for me to grasp.  Although Mary has been my Advent companion for the past several years, this week I find myself out in the dark, cold fields with the shepherds, out somewhere in the wild darkness still, waiting for the light, yearning for a star and a song to rend the night.  But I can share a few old words of my own, a story written back in the early days of being a family of six, when the shock of a surprise pregnancy of twins was still wearing off in the summer of 2012.  May you be blessed wherever you find yourself this week.  

* * * * *

Impossible . . .  

Snacks at our house are served in small glass Pyrex bowls - that and baby food and cereal and anything else that needs to be consumed.  They’ve also been used to serve cheerios to pet ants in the back yard and make a perfect bed for my daughter’s small, white beanie-baby kitten.  

We have almost ten of these bowls and go through nearly all of them on a daily basis.  When the twins are old enough to take part in the great American tradition of sitting in front of the TV with a snack in hand we will go through even more of these bowls.  

The other day I ordered four more from Amazon, thinking we’d stock up, but I accidentally ordered the wrong size – 6oz, not 10.  One morning I served my four year old his cereal in one of these new bowls and he noticed the difference right away.  

“Mom, this bowl shrank!  How did it shrink?!”  

I couldn’t resist telling him that I did it.  I wove an elaborate tale about how I was very tired because shrinking bowls was hard work and I’d stayed up all night to do it.  

His questions abounded, “How did you do it?  Can you shrink more?”  

“No, only four – it’s very hard work,” I replied.  

“Did you put them in hot water?” “Can you shrink me?”  

Later, on the way to preschool, he commented from the back of the van, “Boy, you must be really tired if you stayed up all night shrinking bowls.”  

//

He questions everything, but not the idea that it can be done because for him there’s no reason it can’t be done.  There’s also no reason for him to think he won’t be a jungle explorer when he grows up (along with the whole family, and my job will be to stay back at the hut with the babies!) or dig a hole big enough for us all to live in on our next trip to Grandpa’s house (my job, he says, will be to stay at the top and make sure it doesn’t fall in on everyone else).  

He’s too young to absorb the laws of physics which declare that glass bowls can’t shrink (though they do break!).  Too young to separate with clear lines the possible from the impossible.  

A few weeks ago I met a new couple at church who asked, in getting to know me, “Do you have kids?”  My reply to such questions until now has been something like, “We have two kids, six and four, and then we also have twins.”  Splitting them up this way seems to make it sound more sane, less the impossible reality that it is.  But that day, for the first time, I replied without qualifying, “I have four kids.”  

//  

I wander around the house these days, treading water, trying to stay afloat while crunching layers of cheerios under my feet and endlessly ferrying dirty glass bowls from one room to another.  

I tell myself I’m the least likely candidate to be in charge of what feels like a small daycare.  I think to myself, “This is not me.  This is not possible.  How can I be a mother of four kids?”  

//  

Children don’t know the difference between what is and isn’t possible.  Maybe this is part of what Jesus meant when he said we should become as little children if we’re going to be able to enter into the kingdom of God - the kingdom where the lines between possible and impossible and all the other polar opposites we think the world depends on are so deeply blurred.  

God's doing something strange here at my house, something no less amazing than shrinking glass bowls.  God works late into the night – taking my tiny heart, my too small life and cracking it open.   

It’s very hard work you see - with human hearts it’s two steps forward, one step back, as the muscle contracts God reaches out, yet again, to pry it open.   

I’m learning to lean into the expansion, to believe in the impossible and say with Mary, “Let it be unto me . . .”   

God, make me, make all of us, like a little child, like Mary.  Teach us to believe beyond what we can see, grant us the courage needed to live into the impossible things that you have made possible. 

I've been blessed this Advent to journey alongside of John D. Blase and Winn Collier - as we reflect on the same scripture passage each week.  Stop by their spaces to see the story through a different light.  I'm honored that they accepted my request to cast my lot with them this year and my heart has been blessed by an opportunity to walk with others through this darkness toward the coming light.