Good morning…
On the other end of the phone, her voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me. Uptight. High-churchy. A bull-in-a-china-shop talker. I must admit, I turned down the volume on my listening ears, saying to myself, “We are SO DIFFERENT, complete opposites.”
When it was my turn to share some thoughts, I talked about locking eyes with an the owl from three feet away and in gratitude googling “What do owls symbolize?” Wisdom. Mystery. Transition. Sacred knowledge. From this creature’s soulful stare, I sensed God’s promise: “I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places…” (Isaiah 45:3a, NIV). Because of my dyslexic brain, I also talked about feeling overwhelmed by the reading load for my Spiritual Direction training program. I worried I was falling behind, really falling behind…until Sunday morning when I read my way to the single page needed for my Sunday school lesson. On page 132 in Dallas Willard’s Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God the LORD encouraged, “I am setting your reading pace and you are walking in step.”
After a long silence, her voice on the other end of the phone said, “I can’t believe we are SO SIMILAR.” She calmly went on to share her story. This week, as she stood beside her car at the park, a hawk flew down, perch on her open car door, and locked eyes with hers from three feet away. In peaceful awe she went home to google, “What do hawks symbolize?” Discernment. Intuition. Observation. Wisdom. Words from the birds tilled our common ground. And then she said, “Guess what page I ended my reading on last night? Page 132.”
The LORD is at work in each of us …[manifesting His spiritual completeness and exercising our spiritual gifts in unity] (Ephesians 4:13b, AMP).
…Sue…
