A dog barks and I snap back into the present. It is Sunday, a day I have been trying to honor as Sabbath. I sit on my backporch and type trying not to look or notice the unswept decking. I have walked by a clean pile of unfolded clothes and my unmade bed several times today. Today I am trying to slow down and listen. Pay attention to those most important around me and soak them up instead of the neverending phone and internet distractions. I am listening but also trying to find my voice that has not had much to say for quite some time. A foggy cloud has been hovering over me these last few months. Recent world and national events have brought me to my own place of despair and recognitions of some extremely horrible realities of my past. This has put me in a desperate and hard place. I could stay under the rock of depression and hurt but instead am making new attempts to look and hear breaks of sound in the gray matter. And the light does flicker and filter through in certain moments but just as quickly the billowing wind brings more tough, cold weather. Raw wounds are exposed and cut open without warning. And then words of women who share their hearts and bare their souls come in and become healing ointment to my injuries.
From her book, "Bittersweet" Shauna Niequist beautifully pens,
"The idea of bittersweet is changing the way I live, unraveling and re-weaving the way I understand life. Bittersweeet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness.
Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gustsy, earthy."
This is a bittersweet time for me. I can't cling to the bitter or the sweet of this season but embrace both and find my voice as I listen,not just hear, what God is saying to me. Today marks a new journey. I am begininng a new writing project here. I may not share it with anyone but me but I hope to learn much as I listen and allow God to speak His voice into my heart. I will strive to be honest and transparent without fear of pleasing others. I will search high and low for Whispers of His grace in the Wind and in finding them I will inhale these priceless gifts of grace deep and pray for strength to believe it first for myself and then exhaling slowly and steadily into the lives of those in my path.
