Good morning…
Daily I am fed by writers pouring hard, beautiful words into my inbox. My gut nods in agreement, “This truly is true.”
The wisdom of Betty Skinner, shared above, mysteriously mingles with words from Kate Bowler this week.
Your world has shrunk.
Pain or grief or fear has sucked up every bit of oxygen from the room
and every ounce of delight has been squeezed from your hands.
Blessed, are you learning to live here,
in this unrecognizable, unnamable place.
Blessed are you who discover that even in the smallness,
our attention might be compressed even more.
You who pull out a magnifying glass
to discover, to notice, to taste, to smell
the small joys and simple pleasures that make a life worth living.
In the very next email, a gift from Thea Bowman curls up beside me.
I grew up with people who believed you could serve the Lord from a sickbed or a deathbed. The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, and all your strength. As long as I have my mental facility, I want to keep on loving. I want to keep on serving. That is what I hope to be about. My illness has helped me realize how fragile our hold on life is. I always thought I was going to live to be an old woman, like my mother and my father and all the other people I know and was close to when I was a child. But I no longer think that. My time isn’t long. Now I just want to find ways to make the most of the time I have.
Shocking. Stunning. Simplifying.
Courage.
Trust.
Balance.
Wholeness.
Now, right now. Find ways to make the most of time.
Discover.
Notice.
Taste.
Smell.
Small joys and simple pleasures make a life worth living. Like newborn babies hungry for milk, you should want the pure teaching that feeds your spirit (1 Peter 2:2a, ERV).
…Sue…
