Sweet and Sour

 It is a sweet and sour kind of night. 

A night where the sweet slips in briefly between the sour and  I capture it quick before it turns again.  A sweet moment of contentment while dining on fries and nuggets where such a pleasure is usually forbidden.  It is just he and I and we both are in need  of reprieve and a quilted blanket picnic tonight.

 

Oh this sweet and sour boy of mine.  How he fills me up and drains me dry. 

 

It is a constant push and pull.  The push for freedom and the pull to be sure I haven't let him go. 

 

He is all "YES!" to my "no" and "NO!" to my "yes". 

 
 
 



He struggles so hard for his words and the ones that come are rarely clear and often misunderstood.  It is always a fight for him to be heard and known when he doesn't communicate the same as those of us who are trying to listen.   We are both battle weary by the end of the day.   So I will savor this sweet to help temper the tang of the sour. 

 

 

Rainy Day Perspective

Rainy Day Perspective

2/22/13
9:00 am

Today is a rain day.  I totally needed a rain day today.  I have written before about how much the rain cleanses me.  I tried to take a picture of the rain from my view in the living room this morning.  My plans were to write about how these kinds of days make me want to write and how I wished I had a bay window to sit in, with comfy, colorful pillows all around.  But instead something else happened when I took that picture.

It has been a long time since I have felt that God has spoken to me.  Mostly because to be completely honest I have been angry and didn't try listening for Him much.  I was both afraid to hear what He might want to tell me about my attitude and actions and I was annoyed with Him.  I know the Bible says that all things work together for good for those who love Him, but I could see nothing good coming from me.  It can get pretty dark in this here brain of mine sometimes and well I was tired of it, because O M G when will it just end!?.  I am kinda ready to be "normal" now God, okay? 

So, back to the rain, and the picture.  Like I said, I took a picture of the rain as it was coming down really hard, but in the picture you can't see it.  You can see the effects of it: the wet ground, the puddles it created, the watery distorted reflections of the world around it.   In that moment when I looked at that photo God spoke to me, subtly without words.  It was just a flash of understanding. 

You see I realized that in so many of us, maybe even all of us, is that we are so much like that picture.  Others and sometimes even ourselves see us through the smeared glass filter.  It is easy to see the effects of the rain in our life: the mud, the puddles, the distorted water views; but the rain itself is hidden.  It just looks messy.  Instead of focussing on the cause of the mud in our lives, we just focus on the mud itself.  And we begin to see those distorted reflections as reality. 

My challenge and part of my healing is learning how to see the rain in myself and in others and not just focus on what it leaves behind. I need to stop looking at the watery distorted reflections, and look at what is really there, because the reality has so much more depth than the reflection.

*the smeary  child-sized fingerprints on the window, well I could say that it portrays how the fingerprints of others can affect our perspective or something equally deep, but the reality is that I just need to wash my windows.  Or maybe needing to wash the fingerprints of others of my windows is really the deeper analogy. You can be the judge.  ;)

On Being Brave

On being brave and speaking out
There will always be people who will judge and condemn and not hear the hurt behind the bravery or who will look to add shame to the already shamed. Those people might hear the words, but they are deaf to the cries from the heart of the one being brave. Those people will always exist. They are the ones who keep people from bravery, from being able to share. But there are others too. They are the ones who desperately need to hear those heart cries of the brave, so that their own heart might be able to cry out with them and in the process both can begin to heal. And then there are those whose hearts don’t necessarily cry in the same way as the brave ones, but they need to hear those words so that they might understand and help other crying hearts heal.It is for those who cry and for those who need to understand that we should be brave; that I should be brave. Give me grace Lord to still love the ones who judge and condemn and give me the strength to not live in their condemnation.