I am legit at a precipice.
It’s funny how God can lead you away from everything else so you can learn to connect…
With yourself.
I have decided to lean into the “unhurried rhythms of grace” in a season of intentional disconnect from the general (and closer) populace.
It has meant an absence from the things that many of us value, the traditions I’ve learned to expect, the relationships in which I have grown complacent… absent… or stuck in.
But in the absence…
Is an uncomfortable place:
Space.
I find myself reaching for something to fill it.
The silence seems too pregnant.
But there is the key.
What have I come to expect?
Does pregnancy (typically) last forever?
Or with the growth of what is being knitted together, does it give way to something different? Can it mean a different perspective or a shifting? A fog that is lifting? Hint that is glinting?
Hope.
I caught myself longing for connection just a bit ago.
I picked up my phone. I looked for messages.
“I looked for comforters and found none.”
Could it be the missing red circle notifying me of something…
Indicated that there was something else to notice? Something deeper inside of me?
Does connection always come from without?
Or can it come from within?
I decided to find out.
And in the pregnant pause, where thoughts have come rushing along, where a grasp at the old— so automatic a response— manifested a pattern and systems that leaning into transition has exposed to be inadequate…
Became a moment of art.
The above drawing came out.
As I looked away from my automatic response and chose a different way, crying out from my heart to the Father and letting some Mav City play:
“You can have my heart. You can have my heart…”
And the message was:
Stay.
Trust.
Obey.
I’m coming.
My present seat alone can be seen as confined, without hope, a place to mourn old.
Or it can be seen as a place to believe that God has more.
I can choose to ignore the indications that my old life is going, going, gone.
Or I can reach out for hope that I am exactly where I belong:
In between.
With Hope rising on the dawn.
I don’t believe my life is gone. I believe that the more where I belong is coming. But to get there, I have to willing to shut the door on the things that don’t satisfy anymore. I want to choose to believe at the Father’s word:
New is coming, it’s even at the door.
And it’s here in this place that I can reach back to old, and feel stuck within an ill-fitting normal.
Or I can hold out hope for more…
The one my heart, my deepest truest heart longs for…
And trust that all I have waited for…
Is about to begin.
One week left, 2020.
But HOPE begins here.
Sheree Black 