July has been so busy.  7 schedules intertwining, overlapping, always someone gone, something to do.  And still food to cook, a house to clean, words to write.  Trips to friends’ houses.  Camp.  VBS.  Visiting family from out of state.  A sick kid, meetings, birthday parties, another sick kid.  It has been chaotic, and quiet time – that soul stilling time, has been hard to find. 

I am growing tense, restless, frustrated.  My introverted side has been depleted this month, and it’s been a struggle to find the time to just be, alone, quiet.  I can feel it.  In my back and shoulders.  I’m tense.  I look at everything that needs to get done, and the energy required.  I look at all the running we are doing and I just want to stop.

Finally, I do.  I have no more words to write.  I’m fried, burned out, done.  I turn to a book.  I want to escape into another world.  It’s a book I ordered from the library.  Mentioned somewhere on the book posts of a couple of weeks ago.  Surprised By Oxford.  I’m so involved in the story, I read it for hours, without checking Twitter or Facebook.  I’m just reading, absorbed, fascinated.

Her words save me.  They remind me of what is underneath and through all of this chaos.

Every couple of pages I find something inspiring, uplifting.  Calming and stilling.

Few people have the imagination for reality. – Goethe

Life is messy.  Life is beautiful and terrible and messy.  So why would we expect a faith in this life that is easy to understand?  Why expect a gift wrapped up neatly within the tissues of our brains and tied with a nice bow of material clarity?  I thought of TDH’s image of things coming full circle in grace.  Funny, again, how nothing is wasted.  If my long days in retail taught me anything, it was that a round gift is the most difficult to wrap.

{on Lazarus} I imagine the onlookers agape at agape…..But then I saw that even Jesus pointed out how that would nullify any humanly graspable illustration of the purpose of the story, like blaming a book for having a plot, or shouting at the heroine in a horror movie not to pen that door……..I detected something bigger happening here.  A love that turns back to a place of danger to retrieve its beloved.  A love that illustrates itself in acts and words and trust.  A love at work in the seen and the unseen.  A love that weeps over us, releases us, raises us, removes our grave clothes, and tells us we are free to go.

Maybe there was something to this prayer thing.  Articulating my need whenever I need to (and especially whenever I did not think I needed to)?  Burrowing into my want and coming through it transformed?

I did not have to carry everything on my shoulders.  I did not have to be everything to everyone.  I did not have to know all the answers.  Could it be that sometimes glorifying God involves negatives?

Everything scatters from us but will come back.  We are connected to everything, so the Fall affected everything.  In a restored and truly brave new world, at the wiping away of tears and the removal of fear, the thaw will not trick, the birds will not flee, I will not run.  I get it.  I get it.  I get all the old clichés.  The lion will lie down with the lamb.

The point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rilke

Living your faith is risky, but it’s worth it.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. – Rilke

Fear lies at the unexamined core of who we are.  Faith grows from the surpassing of fear in spite of its presence.  It is not a denial of fear, but rather a “working” from fear, so that faith, by its very process itself, acknowledges the fear and in fact uses it to engulf the fear itself, transforming it into the most powerful, rather than debilitating force there is: love.

I have 6 chapters left, and a busy weekend ahead of me.  I will read them at night, and pause.

In the midst of chaos, life.

Linking up with Sarah Bessey.