Blessed Contractions

I am a created being, set in time and space by His design.  I am in a relationship with the God who envisions and unfolds, though I see it so thinly, and I am filled with His Spirit who brings joy and purpose into the years and days and moments for Him to catch them and tenderly hold the most precious things we can give—our true selves shattered though we may be.  I, WE, have received the invitation of the King, an endless treasure waiting to work His beauty and strength into us and into the world.

But the message is somewhat in disguise, and certainly challenging to our human tendencies of self-preservation.  We are asked to take part in the great things He imagines and empowers to be.  In the midst of this amazing opportunity to live in His company, I am vulnerable, wounded, broken, and sometimes disappointed.   Living hurts and I can only see both the things of earth and of heaven in part.  And right in the middle of that perspective He asks me to be willing to trust Him. He knows it is in the rebirth from the shrouded womb of veiled understanding and foggy eyes that gains me glimpses of the light of truth, the breath of His Word and call, and the ability to stretch and move and play and twirl that can only be discovered when I am free from former prison bars.  This journey often feels like death.  It too often feels scary and constricting and harsh, until we have progressed through the birthing canal of obedience and perseverance and trust, and finally feel more tangibly His warmth and muscular arms holding us and celebrating our life on the other side of these particular contractions.   

Remarkably, old wounds can be healed in new time.  Lost days can be redeemed in these new calendar pages.  Years that the locusts of our lives have consumed can be restored as we sit with Him and let Him tell us the stories of all that He sees for the coarse fabrics of earthly life and the damage that we, and others, have done. 

As I consider time and the passing of years, blessings He has given, and missed opportunities, I realize again that He IS the beginning and the end and the One who is equally present in all, through all, over all.  A day or a moment are only limited for His glorious fingerprints by the width of the doorway I offer Him.  But when I will believe and welcome Him in, I feel again the power of His nearness, the deep assurance of His delight, the beauty that is HERE that fear would have had me miss.  

He has brought back to mind twice recently a word and vision that made a significant mark on me back in the fall of 2000.  “Come play with Me,” He said.  And it is in trusting the One I discovered in that moment, a Savior who delights in our companionship, that He really is a God of resurrection work.  The tomb of Lazarus, the burial place of Joseph of Arimathea that He briefly borrowed, and the seeming deaths of our own lives are not barriers for Him if we will come out of our tombs when He calls our name.  He is the God of “never-too-late”.  When He is present, anything is possible.