Living for the Other...

I have been in airports and needed nothing less than the strength of my Holy Heavenly Father to lift my feet towards the security check and on toward my gate. The constant motion of life is making me seasick.

I have been in classes where the professor said, in a statement of quite basic reality, most of life is saying goodbye. It made me lose my breath and grit my teeth. I'm over goodbyes.

I have been a foreigner in many lands under a sky that is far too beautiful for this earth and wondered why it should be content to hang there above us while we go about in dirt and business ignoring it. All this wandering is making me homesick.

I am finding that America is a land where time passes quickly because no one honors it. We speed through our days the way we gobble down food and make quick work of our checking accounts. Nightmares come true when my peace is shattered on the alter of things to do and jealousy for time, unnumbered and uninterrupted, alone with my Father stalks like an angry giant around in my soul. We weren't made for this American dream.

Lhasa weighs like the stillness of many mountains on my heart. It is a slumbering beast; I can feel it's heavy breathing. But I can't wake it, not yet.

And I move step by shaky, curious step along a pathway of grace that my Father has laid out for me. Friends seem to appear just at the moment I feel that I'm falling, conversations and laughter and phone calls and meals and emails and benches in front of fountains appear like a magic walkway over an abyss I dare not contemplate long.

...and I know I can trust that Lion of the tribe of Judah for another day more... even if it's only with a heart that feels like a jar of jellybeans that someone has thrown so carelessly to the floor and shattered. Sticky jellybeans lying amidst shards of glass and dust.

May He be honored by so broken and confused an offering.