Morning by Morning

Morning by Morning

Morning by Morning

I'm reminded today by the quiet. Reminded of so many things.

I was reading this morning verses from Genesis 21:15-19 and thinking about Hagar and Ishmael and Abraham and Sarah. Golly, life can be so hard and get so complicated. It can make us ugly or beautiful, and realistically a combination of both. We become people who curse rather than bless. My prayer is to be a person who blesses, who chooses to speak life and grace. Over the course of a lifetime, so many opportunities to choose life. To choose blessing.

The beach speaks to me of the wonder of the infinite goodness of God - the magnitude of his majesty and the wonder of the intimacy of his knowing every grain of sand. The wonder of the patterns made in the landscape of our life by living water.

In these days of quiet mornings, my husband rarely gets a good night's sleep, eats his breakfast and goes back to bed. Sleep is something he needs so badly but night after night evades him. So many things have been tried to no avail. Night after night, he dreams in cinematic long-form drama. He says last night was one of the worst. He was warding off people with guns and jujitsu fighting and the sheets and blankets are witness to the drama.

So, I do what I can. I cook. He loves a good breakfast - his usual is what he likes though I try, now and again, to change things up a bit. But whenever I ask it's always his usual English muffin with sausage and egg, a bowl of mixed fruit, and his orange juice mixed with Metamucil. I listen. Blow by blow to his dream narration and sometimes we try to figure out if there's something the dream is wanting him to see. And as soon as he's finished eating, he falls asleep. Thankfully. Morning by morning. He usually sleeps at least two hours. And sometimes I sleep too, or I read, pray, and sometimes feel a nudge to write, like this morning.

This morning I'm sitting with the ugliness of how expectations of how things are meant to be and the reality of the hardness of hope deferred can makes our hearts sick. Left unattended hope deferred can turn our hearts to stone. We can choose to stand around looking and listening to everything that isn't - to unanswerable whys and cruel what ifs.

Without honest attention, we will stand around too long and then realize we've chosen to sit down, making friends with the unsatisfying gruel of what isn't. Morning by morning we become fixated upon "What isn't" and that emptiness can bit by bit become our identity. Keeping our eyes fixated upon everything we don't have blocks the wonder of everything we do have. Our landscape will become gnarled, warped if we focus always on the way we think things should be. Our eyes become fixed upon somewhere out there on the horizon, always out there, where the water seems never to reach our shore.

But, it doesn't have to be this way. Morning by morning, I continue to realize If get to pause - stop - look, listen, be still and know.

Right here, right now, right where my feet are, God is here. I tell myself the truth, "You are here."

God is here, right where I am. God is not far off. Yesterday, today, this morning I invite God into the truth of what is in my heart, in my thoughts, in my lived experience. Where I've been, where I am, and where He knows I will be. He is with me, just like He said. I can look down and see my feet firmly planted. Planted in springs of living water. I can see right where I am in all the patterns of truth made by wave upon wave in the reality of all my days.

Right here, right where I look down, I can see the beauty of the goodness in where I stand. Right here, right now, right where my feet are. My feet are firmly planted in "What is." God is not far off. God is with me, God is with my husband, our God is with us - closer than our breath.