Good morning…
“Supposed to be nearing 80-degrees today, so our 4:00 pm lacrosse game will be a scorcher!” yesterday I texted my parents and sister who each live in small towns near Cleveland, Ohio. “Enjoy your Saturday. What are you all up to?”
“Track meet got rained out today and it’s supposed to snow tomorrow,” my sister replied. “I’m thinking 80-degrees sound pretty nice!”
Our brief text exchange reminded me of page 101 in When The Heart Wait. “All through March the weather remained unpredictable,” writes Sue Monk Kidd. “A vacillating pattern of light and dark. The sun shone one day; the next it retreated into the clouds. I vacillated too.”
She continues: “We have within us a deep longing to grow and become a new creature, but we possess an equally strong compulsion to remain the same – to burrow down in our safe, secure places. The truth is that we are a patchwork of light and dark, torn between what Quaker writer Thomas Kelly called “the enhancement of our own little selves” and “the God-possessed will.”
Monk Kidd concludes: “Shifting from a self-centered focus to a more God-centered focus is terribly hard. I think we’ve gone wrong assuming that such a radical movement can be achieved simply by setting our jaw and saying one prayer of relinquishment. Letting go isn’t one step but many. It’s a winding, spiraling process that happens on deep levels. And we must begin at the beginning: by confronting our ambivalence.”
As we savor this Sabbath, we take time to experience again the light and the dark, the hot and the cold, the sun and the clouds we have noticed this week. Touch six times on the “Previous” tab above this post and embrace once again our two-sided tug.
Let’s do our best to know the Lord. His coming is as certain as the morning sun; he will refresh us like rain renewing the earth in the springtime (Hosea 6:3, CEV).
…Sue…
