Eclectic Waters

Archive for August, 2006

“A kind of earthquake in the center of my life shook everything up, and left me to rearrange the pieces…As the aftershocks reverberate, I have had to approach some simple tasks in new ways…Looking back at my past. Loving my husband. Raising my children. Being a woman. It is no accident that each of those tasks is couched in the present participle, that lovely part of speech that simply goes on and on and on…I have learned…life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. That is what I am doing now. Muddling through the middle. Living out loud.”

Quindlen, Anna. Living Out Loud. New York: Ivy books, 1988.

I feel as though this past year has been that earthquake experience for me, although there may be other greater earthquakes in my future. I am still not sure what is being built out of it or even who I am emerging from this as. But I know I have changed, am changing, and that I do not want to live quietly.

When you accept the fact that sometimes seasons are dry and times are hard and that God is in control of both, you will discover a sense of divine refuge, because the hope then is in God and not in yourself.

I have had people ask me to define or take stock of my relationship with God.

How?, I think.

How do I define water, life, the way my thoughts ebb and flow around him and the way his truth provides the banks from which my thoughts bounce…

artists strive to capture that beauty or pain just beyond their grasp

i reach towards heaven and never get enough of God

am not satisfied…

hunger

thirst

beauty

pain

longing

love

hope

– describe one of these for me

water

– capture every aspect and every form of it

and perhaps i can tell you all that God is to me…