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Monday, October 13th, 2003
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11:58a - Fire
Today is the most beautiful autumn day I've seen in quite a long time, and just perfect for an evening bonfire surrounded by friends. Singing, laughing, talking, eating, getting all toasty by the fire! What a pleasure. I look forward to tonight with great expectancy. Pastor Schaller is going to speak!
I had to be at work today at 7:45 to make sure the conference room had coffee brewing and the food was delivered. I am the catering connection (hehe) for my department. Then I had to drive downtown to the main Johns Hopkins Hospital for the Big Meeting o' the Month, where I get to sit serenly and very secretary-like and listen to thirty adults try to agree with each other. It's great fun--but only because I don't have to say a word. The one reason I am required to go to this meeting is to press a button on my little recording device (all shiny and high-tech, wheee!) so I can make sense of all they decided later in the week when I do the real work of listening and editing. *Sigh* I'm glad the meeting is only an hour and a half. Today they would have talked forever if another group hadn't been waiting outside the door for our room. :)
Haven Street. I drive down it to get to the hospital for my meeting. It's depressing there, lined with old factories along one side and dingy row-houses along the other. Haven Street is where you most commonly see the prostitutes. I didn't see any today. They always tear my heart up when I see them. Women of shame, dressed in Salvation Army mini-skirts and trying so hard to be beautiful on the outside when they feel like death on the inside. Once, as I drove by, I saw one getting out of an old blue pick-up truck and wave jauntily back at the driver, who had slowed trafic to let her out. They both laughted and she sauntered away. I felt sick inside. No women needs to live in that, no woman. Yet they do not believe there is a way out... So what matters what they do with their body? Hopelessness destroys the soul.
Such despair in that lifestyle, such shame. And every one of them has a Rescuer who is desperate to rescue them, to heal their hurts and remove their shame forever. Every one of them is valuable, more than a nation's treasure, more than the moon, more than a thousand suns. The Creator wept and died for them. "...while we were yet sinners..." Oh, Beloved.
. . . . .
Saturday was the Womens' Seminar. What a blessing to my life is this time away from my daily schedule. For me, it took the entire weekend of a steady diet of the Word of God before the change came. By the end of the day yesterday I felt... different. It was a mixture of happy and confident and expectant and something else. Joy, bubbling down deep, under a blanket of peace like winter creeks hide under the soft snow. I looked around my room last night and wanted to just weep for all that I've been given--given, not just happend to come across or earn by some effort of my own. My mind wandered to the dear memories of the house I grew up in, the carpets and bookshelves, the brick red kitchen and Mom reading in her chair. I thought of the day I packed all my most treasured belongings into my little blue escort and turned the ignition. That day was like this day: expectant, joyful, believing. What is surrender? Surrender is relaxing. Letting your feet stop touching the bottom and the current carries you where it will.
I think that, mostly, the seminar left me feeling... beautiful. Valuable, useful! No matter how badly I mess up my life, God is not interested in halting my progress to have a pity party. Just, somehow, I feel so beautiful. A treasure to be cherished and a vessel to pour out. I can't wait to be a missionary. God can do anything.
Today I feel more like a woman and less like a young woman. I will be turning twenty-five in two and-a-half weeks. What a thing to ponder.
Such an adventure, this faith-life! I feel as if the whole world is jealous of the Divine favor I've found. And they should be. The whole world is searching for what I've stopped searching for: unconditional love. Love that does not and will not stop, love constant, yet new each moment. Love that transforms. Love so startling in its intensity... love that means business. Love that cannot be persuaded to turn from it's destination: me. Love that protects and cherishes even when I scream and shake my fist and fight against it with every ounce of strength I own. Because this love is unconditional. Does anyone out there know what this means? Can any of us understand the thing that our soul craves with such reckless abandon that we will do anything to experience it? We search until we are soul-weary. Yet love is there, hungering for the day we relax, the day we respond. So patient is He, waiting for His Beloved to notice His eyes on her. What a sweet adventure, this life of mine.
Oh, be jealous. Be so jealous that you reach out and take His hand for yourself.
current mood:  pleased (3 comments |comment on this)
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