a poet came to our church last sunday afternoon and reminded us to be present in the tension. we don't need to be solving the problems or answering all the questions or doing it all just right. we can stay in the in-between, in the not-quite-right-but-this-is-what-i-have, live unashamedly in the presence of a God who sees and loves and delights, who leads us gently, always with grace.
i stopped writing because i wanted to pretend the tension was gone, i wanted to just be with my arms of full of children, my body pushing prams to the park, conversing in the neighbourhood with people different than me still but i didn't want to keep examining it all. i always try to run from writing like i'm holding back tears, if i just keep blinking they will slide back down to the bottom of my heart. but they never do. i'm pretty much the worst at holding back tears, anyway.
it's funny to be 32 and really have no idea, to have my days gobbled up by children who are rarely satisfied, who mirror my beauty and my hurt, who all slept in my bed(s) while my husband was away. it feels both like i should be much more than i am while feeling incapable of being even the bare minimum of who i need to be.
i have so many pregnant friends right now who have no choice but to confess the here but not yet nature that is having a whole new person inside of you, growing slow. there is hope and there is consummation and we live daily in the neither and both and the tender risk of it all.
i'm not pregnant now and likely won't be again but there is something truer than anything in the way God imagined newness would come from dust through the holy bodies of women. it takes dark and time and quiet and waiting and we are all changed in the gestating, we are all growing up, we are all born again, made new.
i stopped writing because i wanted to pretend the tension was gone, i wanted to just be with my arms of full of children, my body pushing prams to the park, conversing in the neighbourhood with people different than me still but i didn't want to keep examining it all. i always try to run from writing like i'm holding back tears, if i just keep blinking they will slide back down to the bottom of my heart. but they never do. i'm pretty much the worst at holding back tears, anyway.
it's funny to be 32 and really have no idea, to have my days gobbled up by children who are rarely satisfied, who mirror my beauty and my hurt, who all slept in my bed(s) while my husband was away. it feels both like i should be much more than i am while feeling incapable of being even the bare minimum of who i need to be.
i have so many pregnant friends right now who have no choice but to confess the here but not yet nature that is having a whole new person inside of you, growing slow. there is hope and there is consummation and we live daily in the neither and both and the tender risk of it all.
i'm not pregnant now and likely won't be again but there is something truer than anything in the way God imagined newness would come from dust through the holy bodies of women. it takes dark and time and quiet and waiting and we are all changed in the gestating, we are all growing up, we are all born again, made new.
I totally understand the holding back tears feeling, and I am the best at running away, but half the work is just getting started, tears and all.
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