Friday, January 28, 2005

Sir Render

Surrender = Sir Render

The veil was rent. I will trust Him, and He will rend me. It will be for the highest, noblest, most fantastic cause. The eyes of my heart can’t see it, but something in my head knows it and agrees fully with the veracity of it.

Two friends I have now who are fully surrendered. They are delightful company—eager, joyful, and childlike to almost an annoying degree. The content of their speech now is kind of “out there,” not a place I frequent regularly because it’s a high kind of place, this absolute yieldedness.

Seems like it’s a place of a color just beyond the limited ability of my rods and cones. It seems like a wonderful place, like a Who Wouldn’t Wanna Go There place. I feel like a child stretching on her tippy-tippy toes to see what’s in the glass jar she just discovered is on the counter because her two sisters just got something out of it, but dangit, she’s just too short, and they have neither the permission nor the ability to give her any. I pace and stop, study and think, wondering how or even IF I’m going to get into that jar.

Can’t help thinking that rending must be prerequisite to surrender, and that this could get ugly...

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

a deposit of words

Is it weird at all to anyone else that I’m here in my little home, and you’re out there in your own little wherever-you-are, and somehow we connect as you take in the words I’ve deposited in cyberspace...? We think it’s such a big world one moment, and the next, our paths cross... and somewhere, that matters.

I love this quote:

What are you afraid of? Let God act. Abandon yourself to Him. You will suffer, but you will suffer with love, peace and consolation. You will fight, but you can carry off the victory, and God Himself, after having fought with you, will crown you with His own hand. You will weep, but your tears will be sweet, and God Himself will come with satisfaction to dry them. You will not be free any longer to give yourself up to your tyrannic passions, but you will sacrifice your liberty freely, and you will enter into a new liberty unknown to the world, in which you will do nothing except for love. ~François Fénelon

It’s that last line that something in my deeps just gloms onto: “you will do nothing except for love.” Oh, that is THE highest form of living!

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

tiny beauty

I like these words I read in a devotional by Brennan Manning:

"We first experience beauty usually in the things that surround us. Sometimes in sensible things, other times in the transparency of a look or a glance that reveals a soul full of light. Whenever we encounter the beautiful, our hearts awaken, stir, quicken, thrill, because there is an extraordinary, magic power in the least thing: a tiny plant burgeoning in spring, a shade of the sky at a given moment of the day, a calm, cold night brilliant with starshine--all things that ravish the heart. They’re a small taste of Paradise Lost on an earth where so many things are torn and tearing. They are little oases in the vast wasteland of the world."
(Is. 40:26 ref.)

It's the sum total of all the little things that color the lenses of how we see life.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

One Humble Soul

Did You tell her to do that? Or is she so in tune with Your Holy Spirit that Your prompt and her desire meet and move as one…?

To the outside eye, she might be a woman to be little noticed. They don’t get out as much as they used to, she doesn’t drive, doesn’t have a job, and reads and writes a lot--quiet pastimes.

Yet the effects of her ministry reach far beyond the walls of her home. The words of life she shares with us, her “girls,” draw us up to met the Lord Jesus, and there is nothing in all the whole wide world like it. That contact and communion then has its influence on our own friends and families. The pebble tossed with divine, purposeful intent into the water, reverberates in ever-widening, concentric circles to resonate the unending Truth of Him whose gracious Hand let fall the tiny stone.

The poetry that is her life evokes a celebration in my soul that must be only an echo of the gala in Heaven, where the great cloud of witnesses, Your servant hosts, and Your own great heart call out not only notice, but honor, great worth, and esteem for one humble soul poised toward You, devoted, and trusting.