All is Grace

"All is grace" I repeat this often  trying to instill its meaning and truth into the deepest places of my soul.  "All is grace. Today I will receive God and what He gives.  And I will do it with an attitude of gratitude because I am a partaker in the kingdom of God". This is my anthem, and I chant it often. 

As I look up from my kitchen table toda,y I become keenly aware of my  maple's emptiness (it really doesn't belong to me, but it my heart it does)--I'm fairly certain that every single leaf has fallen off.  All that's left are the stark branches mirroring my soul. 

Each year God picks a theme for my life, this year's: vulnerability and availability.  Its been about inner honesty, making space, learning to live outside of time within it, its about slowing down and becoming aware, about rawness, about the risky business of letting people in.  Its been a long season of emptying, like watching the water go down the drain. And I feel a mixture of pride and exhaustion as I look across my year. 

It feels somewhat more sacred this year as we enter the season of advent. As we begin to make more room, as we begin to prepare for the Christ child. In many ways I feel that my whole year has been spent in advent: preparing to and receiving more and more of Christ, making more room for Him.  I feel surprised at the way thankfulness seems to carve out more space for Him.  My logical brain just assumed that thankfulness would fill up the space, not make more room. And so I am filled with hope and anticipation for a deeper filling as we enter the new year. But in the same breath I am keenly aware of the daunting December, the massive exodus.  I know that as I enter the final month of my theme, I will be pushed to my extremes...in fact I already feel that way, more raw and vulnerable,with the terrible call to be vulnerable in the face of hurt, apparent injustice, abandonment, betrayal, but also in the face of all the little daily hiccups of life which perhaps sting more than the major hurts.  And some days I don't feel so brave. And so I pray to be reminded...

That All is grace and today, today I will receive God and what He a lots for me this day... and I will give thanks, because it is good and He is good. 

Enchanted

Just a poem today team...I'll let it speak for itself:

You call me apart, and You call me Yours.
In Your presence is fullness of joy!

You peel back my layers like an onion.
I watch, numb, as Your tears fall.

You wash me like the rug, pulling my stains out...
Faithfully, steadily, completely unconcerned with time.

You're making me new
You're healing my broken places
You're calling me out of death and into life.

My soul is starting to respond,
I feel it behind my eyes,
In the deep corners of my soul.
You're breathing life, hope and joy into my towers of despair.

Enchanted.