Last Fridays was a beautiful Kansas Friday…the thermometer holding steady at 68 degrees. The sun beamed gently and the wind lay still and silent, a welcome respite after Monday and Tuesday, when it howled savagely and relentlessly, blowing dirt in waves and beating against our baby wheat fields. I look out the window and I give our wheat an understanding glance of I-know-how-thirsty-you-are and I will it to hang-in-there!
I smile to myself as I open my bathroom cupboard door to put away my hairspray and I spy the newly re-organized shelves inside and the pretty metal bins I found to separate and add order to the items within. My gaze falls on the overflowing trashcan, and I leave it for now and scoop up dirty laundry instead.
My kitchen floor is in desperate need of mopping, but I roll out pie dough and chop strawberries and crack open the window above my kitchen sink to let the whispers of spring-is-coming waft in and whisper in my ear.
I lift up friends and family this morning, both in prayers of gratitude & rejoicing as well as deep petitions for comfort and peace to surround the stress or suffering today brings some of them.
I think of this conundrum of life.
This tug & pull.
Push & thrust.
Good & not-so-good & not-good-at-all. Wonderful & worthy & worries. Beauty vs. bleak, amazing vs. inadequate, laughter vs. loneliness.
Rejoicing & heart-wrenchingness. Gladness & sadness. Delightfulness & dispiritedness.
I delight today, in the feel of pie dough under my rolling-pin, in the rich red of strawberries, in low pain levels in my leg and foot. For I am all too acutely aware that for every organized cupboard there is an equally overflowing trashcan. 😄
Yet, I will fight to delight in all that is beauty and blessing, because conundrums don’t have easy answers and life doesn’t give us guarantees of time or essence.
And I know these words that promise HOPE~ Roman 5:3-5 ~ Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
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