for when you're unsure: these steps

Dear friend,

I'm not sure, these days, if I'm going up or down this staircase of life. If I'm running towards the things that matter. I'd like to think so. Sometimes forward motion seems better than none at all. And it's a constant learning, going up a few, simply to come down a few more.

Panteleymonovskaya-38-12" by Alex Levitsky & Dmitry Shamatazhi
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I don't know where you fall on the staircase. If you're having sweet triumphs and you're near the top. If you're bruised at the bottom. Whatever direction, I'll meet you in the middle.

Maybe these words will fill you like they did me.

*

She sits one step above me on the staircase. She was on her way down; I was on my way up. That was an hour ago.

"My girl," she says quietly. "You may not feel like you're hearing His voice...but you have His words. Read them. Sit in them and soak them up. Wait for Him."

"Be assured, Elizabeth-

you may not always hear His voice, but you can trust His heart."

*

on waiting | psalms and the sea

Dear friend,

My grandfather was a fisherman. Have I ever told you that?

My best memories are of when he lived near water, when it was clear he had found a stillness. He got up before dawn nearly every morning and learned to read the weather by the morning sky, its colors, textures, and hues.

By Rezensor via Wikimedia Commons

He invited me to go fishing with him when I was a kid. I went once when I was nine and never went again. It seemed like an eternity stretched out between hours, damp with lingering chill, and all I did was sit on a bucket in a wooden boat in the water. 

All I did was wait.
-

About a year ago, I helped pick colors to paint a house. I live in that house now. The green upstairs looks more mint than forest tinged. The firefly yellow looks like a street lamp at dusk. Colors on real walls are different than colors on swatches and cans. Real colors come alive and bump with imperfection, grow warmer and cooler depending on the light and time of day.

If I could give you a polaroid of my life, that's what it looks like now: different from how I've imagined it but alive and warm and surprising despite its imperfections and my own.

In many ways, I am still the girl on the bucket in the boat, surrounded by water. I am older now. My questions are more complicated. I still have handfuls of dreams that are wild, ever reaching things. I still tell elaborate stories. In many ways I am still waiting. And you know, I have found a weird peace with waiting, a respect for the work it does. How it carves away your idea of what matters until what you have left is pure. It challenges everything you think about yourself and humility and grace.

I felt drawn to learn more about Lent in this season because it's all about waiting and expectation. Here in the quiet, I have found time enough and words that feel true-- in this year of waiting, I've finally learned to watch the sky. I've learned to sit in darkness and be still, clinging to what I know is true. To wait for my God, more than the watchmen wait for dawn. Yes, more than the watchmen wait for dawn.
-

On the Fridays leading up to Easter, I'll be blogging along with the community at She Reads Truth. They've been inspiring to me, and I'm happy to write alongside them. My goal is to write every Friday, not anything flawless or fancy, but all totally from the heart. Feel free to join us, read along, or say hello.

With peace,
E

waiting well

You can tell a lot about a person by how they wait.

As I strolled into the Secretary of State office last week, that's what I was thinking.  The room was packed to capacity; over fifty people crammed into folding chairs waiting for a chance to fill out paperwork.  I was number 51.  They were on number one.  It was going to be a long, hot wait.

Most people were playing with their phones, the noise level vacillating between a quiet chatter and a loud buzz.  Some women talked complained with each other.  Most men sat in stoic silence.  A woman with an antsy toddler played eye-spy and cradled a newborn with one arm, while filling out paperwork with another.  A 10-year-old boy offered me his chair, seeing that I had none.

I took it all in; I thought it said a lot about our culture that no one could wait contentedly.  And then I realized that I wasn't, either.

In fact, I'd walked into a room full of real stories with a book in my bag.  I was ready, excited even, to jump into a fictional life when real life was happening right in front of my eyes.  So I took a breath, closed my book, and jumped.
In the next 2 hours and 45 minutes, I found more stories than I ever imagined I would.

The older woman next to me spoke nothing but Italian, and we talked with the help of her daughter.  Language barriers are no match for hand motions and laughter.

The couple near the front had just gotten married.  She rested her head in the crook of his shoulder and in a moment, they seemed like one person.  They carried the hopeful rhythm of people who were figuring out how to share a name and a life together.

The mother playing eye-spy had no one to watch her kids that day, and as she juggled taking caring of them and fighting off their boredom- I admired her bravery and lightheartedness.  When I told her she deserved some kind of cape, her smile came with the bright fervency of someone who goes unappreciated too often.

When I left, still laughing and half-speaking Italian, I was hit with the realization that it matters how we wait.  Because we're always waiting for something, aren't we?

I ache with impatience for red lights to melt into green, high school to turn into college, college to turn into who-knows-what.  I fidget in line, at the store, in the car, filling out paperwork, pumping gas, as if these little in-between transition moments prick like mosquitoes on my skin.  In my sandpaper-motion-whirlwind I often overlook the "little" moments while waiting for something big to happen.  I miss out on good things, beautiful stories right in front of me and simply brush them off in search of something better.

And yet-
life happens in the waiting.

And so often-
I miss it.

I'm so enraptured with waiting for life to begin and big things to happen, that I push past some of the best seasons of my life.  Just one more year until I graduate.  Just two more weeks until my job starts.  Just a week, just a day, just an hour.

The very moments that I rush on past are the same things I should slow down to witness.  Rich moments of human connection and opportunity blossom right in front of me and I want to catch them.  I want to see them.  I want to open my hands to them.  

I don't want to put time in a box and wait for life to begin, when life has already begun.  It's going on all around me, second by second, and I'm missing out on the most beautiful part.  I'm missing out on everything...because friends, there are no little moments or insignificant seasons.  Each comes with its own beauty and responsibility to enjoy it, to live in it, to make the most of it. 

I think it matters how we wait.
And I think it's time I started to learn to wait well.

Here, now.  The coming and the going and the in between waiting.
It's life and it's mine and it's yours, too.
And I don't want to miss it.