Cycles

Nature has its regular cycles and I am recognizing more and more that I have mine too. This end of school year rhythm is chock full and overflowing with activity, from ceremonies and inductions to summer program applications to special field trips to concerts and stage productions to school festivals to open houses to dances and proms and on and on and on...and that's in addition to the regular rhythm of doctors appointments, sports practices, dance classes, swimming lessons, music classes, volunteer activities and the like. My heart starts to palpitate a bit just thinking about it all. My normal boundaries of time and place simply do not seem able to contain it all. Yet, this is the stuff of life, and what a joy and privilege to live it.

I am full to overflowing, or should I say our laptop is, with photographs that chronicle all of these special and wonderful moments of life. How will I ever find the time in this season to share them all? How will I ever find the time to contemplate and reflect on them, to cherish and savor and really emotionally process them? I really don't know. What I do know is that I am grateful and so very blessed. Thank you, Father.

Even now as I think of the thick beauty and rich wonder each day holds, despite its often frenetic activity, I am also sharply aware that many around our world and even more closely, around our nation, live in fear. Fear of rising flood waters from unbound loved rivers and what that means to their home-spaces and community places and family futures, fear of terrorist and ethnic violence and just plain agonizing war misery, that never seems to have an end. Fear of debilitating lack, fear of uncontrollable storms, fear of staggering loss and fear of inevitable change. I ache for those who ache in fear. I wonder why I am privileged to live in relative security. I wonder why I have been granted space to live free from oppressive, daily, tangible fear.

Sometimes I long to see Jesus return with His peace and His ultimate end to fear...yet...not yet...not just yet. So many still need to know Him. So many ache to love Him, not even knowing that their ache and gaping gashes of suffering have remedy and balm. So, not yet, please Lord, not quite yet.

Meanwhile, I love and soothe, I work and press, I pray and live. And sometimes the cycles of my life roll through these rushed and hurried and filled to the over-brim places, and sometimes they meander through quieter, contemplative, reflective, watchful spaces. Balance often seems unattainable, yet perhaps the balance of the rhythm of the whole thread of life in its entirety is indeed balanced? I'm not sure. It probably doesn't matter. What matters is that we live, grateful for life, that we love, grateful for love, that we worship, grateful for the one we worship, and that we share, grateful to have the something...and the someone...to share.

Love Much. Care.