Good Friday. The two challenging kids who are usually in school were home. I was scheduled for a night shift. I was dreading the anticipated lost sleep that night, and wondering how I was going to get through the next week with all my little kids home, my oldest home, and my two big girls away visiting family friends.
After I did my second post on what to read with your kids for Black History Month (you can read the first installment here), I started to think about what we adults could be reading. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings came up when I searched for historical fiction related to slavery in America.
As I started to read it, I got pulled in pretty early on, which is unusual for me – I usually have to warm up to a book, sometimes for a long time, before I really get into it.
When my friend Laurel mentioned Finding Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening Your Soul To Rest, by Bonnie Gray, was next up on her reading pile, I picked up a copy for myself.
Based on the title, I was already on the journey. Plus, I’ve been curious to get a purely Christian perspective on this concept since reading After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, which included Christian ideology alongside other faith traditions.
I’ve introduced a lot of whitespace to my life this year, and I tend to still feel defensive about it. No one really gives me grief about my dance class, but meditation? The first response I often get if I mention that is, “But what do you do while you’re meditating?“
800+
That is the number of photos I have that haven’t been edited from the period leading up to our vacation and the vacation itself.
3 miles.
That’s how far I walked yesterday evening on a snowy bike trail by the Mohawk River, listening to contemplative music and hoping for answers.
2 weeks.
That’s how long we were in Tobago, having a time that was truly transcendent.
1 simple command.
That’s what I heard from God yesterday. The words provided me with my intention for Lent.
Zero.
That’s the number of words I have ready to publish about our trip.
The trip feels like a fantastic dream. The longer I wait to document it, the more it fades from memory. I glance back at the magic, then turn forward to Lent, a period of repentance and waiting.
Life feels like the bare branches of the landscape, occasionally catching the sunlight in a way that shows the ugliness to be beautiful. Summer is a quiet, hopeful memory.
Here’s my Pandora playlist for Lent. My intention is to let women speak wisdom into my life during this wait for Easter. The above photo is one I took on my walk. And appropriately, I realized after I clicked publish that this “numbers edition” is the 200th post on the blog.
Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. James 1:22
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8-9
Ah. Christians and the tension we exist in, between these two verses.
