“Lets go make tracks” she whispers and how can one say no to a request like that?

And we wander in winters first and finest and its easy to feel breath of God on our necks, to sigh spiritual, to whisper praises.

It isn’t the big drama that gets to me. Some of that can reinvigorate me, keeps my perspective real and right.

It is the little annoyances that grate me down to the nub.

The messy kitchen, unfolded laundry, work not all done. It’s the late for school, sleep through alarm, ill-behaved children that make me feel like a failure, make me roar like a lion. It would be nice to separate the spiritual from the mundane, the regular, the ‘today’ that feels entirely too ‘physical’ to be of any ‘spiritual’ value.

But can I tell you a secret?
Its today that are making tracks in the brains of our kids, our friends. Its how we deal with the everyday frustrations that are creating the responses they will burst forth with the rest of their lives. Its how our we react and respond NOW that will define their memories of us, their description of us. It isn’t what they read in our journal someday that will define our character…it is how we love them today.

It is the true test of our maturity. How deep is your trust in Him today? How sure are you that he ordained your everyday ordinaries? How secure is your identity in Him? How deep your peace? Do they transcend and deepen the act of the everyday? Or can I still separate the two, thinking the only spiritual act is to sit with a bible and a journal?

SO today? Even as we feel frustrated at every turn, let us find hope and peace in our spirits where defeat would dwell if we were only flesh.

“We are so abominably serious, so desperately interested in our own characters,  that we refuse to behave like Christians in the shallow concerns of life. Determinedly take no one seriously but God, and the first person you find you have to leave severely alone as being the greatest fraud you have ever known, is yourself”

-Oswald Chambers

Sometimes the world just feels so sharp. Blade to flesh. Sword to heart.

I watch one soul slay another with a word, or by withholding them.

I watch a man speak icy to wife, she feels the frost and pulls herself away… bit.

I see a mother chop down child…right at the knees. I watched him crumple before her.

All of them clinging to the hand that will inevitably slam hard against the cheek.

And there were the others. Those that shopped alone. Lonely. They sought to make eye contact with me and we did and I smiled warm and I felt frost melt and I felt soul draw near and I knew soul deep loneliness from across the meat cooler. I tried to tell them I loved them with eyes alone. Say we’re in this together you and I. When I lifted bran muffin mix she requested from the top shelf and I brushed her hand as we parted and she smiled long and slow as if I had embraced her.

And we all ache together. The deep ache that remind us that this world is not enough. The Spirit twinges that remind us what we are here for…the love bringer who wants to use us to bring love to a loveless world. And the least of us is in all of us, and some of us are just better at disguise. And some of the poorest are the richest and so we watch and wait and we love all because we never know what disguise He will come in.

And this is the way we become peacemakers to a world in desperate need of peace.

At our house? We are trying to tame our ‘wild things’. Teaching them how to calm tensions without flying off the handle on little sisters/big brothers. How about you? How can you make more peace this year? This day?

I’ve been more heat than Light lately. Isn’t that what always happens when one spins too fast? I’ve felt myself slipping into patterns I thought I abandoned long ago. Feeling my sarcasm bite harder, my impatience roar more often, my passion dwindle.

So I’ve been getting back to the hard work of soul tending, of Jesus chasing. When the work is deep? Right down in the base of my heart? The words don’t find their way here. They stay in the leather bound.

Its about Ezekial and Hosea…betrayal and first love…and I have needed to step back from public words for a awhile.

Today I needed only this:

Stand in awe,
and sin not….

and be still.

Selah.

Psalm 4:4

I thought maybe you did too.

Hoping to catch up with Emily and some friends I haven’t read in ages…