Leaving A Trail of Beauty

Following another prompt challenge this week to keep my thoughts flowing and try to be more consistent in posting. I’m a couple days behind on this one hosted by @meredith_mcdaniel, but the Lord has insisted I do NOT overlook or scoot by this first one: ACHE. First off in my head is this—ACHE does not equal pain. Let’s unpack a bit of that thought with the following quote leading the way. “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”   ―  C.S. Lewis A dear friend of mine messaged me this morning and mentioned a couple of different directions I could travel with “ache” as my prompt. She noted both my physical aches as well as that perspective of my heart ache. Using the Lewis quote above, I experience God using the daily ache of my body, driven by a 2001 diagnosis of fibromyalgia, to remind me how dependent I am on Him just to swing my legs...

“For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow , wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.” Habakkuk‬ ‭2:3‬ ‭ESV‬‬ God cannot be rushed. I get impatient at least once a day. Okay. Probably more often than that, especially if any of my day involves being behind the wheel and sharing the road with “slow” motorists. Without Jesus, I’d probably be a pretty rage-filled driver. With Him, I still beep my horn more frequently than some. All that to say . . . though I’m not one to like things to go slow; God has His own timetable. Let’s take  the pace of my healing post-divorce. I gave myself a bit for that. You know . . . a few months should have taken care of it, right?  I was married for more than 20 years, so an extended school-length vacation should have whipped me right back into shape, ready to tackle all things new?!?! As you can most likely guess, it has been quite a SLOW process instead. Patterns ...

I used to think dreaming was a bit like this photo, complete with similar results. I would exhale my dreams out into the world. They’d then catch in the wind . . . only to drift away, settle in the soil, and become someone else’s weed — a virtual nuisance to the ones who caught them. This mindset is directly related to what I shared about feeling like I am too much, therefore it is a natural progression for me to believe my dreams are also way too much. What I have so often neglected to do with my dreams is leave them in the capable grip of the Dreamgiver. My Jesus is perfectly able to fulfill those very dreams He has placed in my heart. However, I am guilty of holding on to them myself, squashing them with my toddler-like fists, and somehow wondering why I feel undervalued and forgotten when I still see myself so far away from my dreams coming to fruition. How do I stop this spiral of unfulfilled dreams from continuing? One way is to identify what dreams I am choosing...

Light. I struggle with feeling anything but light. From as far back as I can remember, someone in my family has had a poor relationship with food. I grew up in a household of diets and closets full of all the seasonal clothes in addition to all the sizes for every season. My parents each had their own self-image battles that ran the opposite ends of the weight spectrum.  The number of times I saw anyone stop and admire the reflection in the mirror amounted to a handful in the 22 + years I primarily resided with my dear parents.  My self esteem and relationship with my own reflection was shaped by what was modeled for me. I saw the critical eye of my parents, internalized their statements to and about themselves, listened to their judgments, and I deduced a number of things that ultimately shaped my thinking about myself for the rest of my life: I said too much ( I was sassy from word one ) I ate too much ( I got to a point of hating the feeling of being...