It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was your hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them.~Psalm 44:3 (NIV)

The other day I imagined myself inside a fenced-in yard. Green and lush Texas St. Augustine grass covered the area. A wrought iron table and two chairs sat under a shady oak. I sat in one of the chairs and admired a pot of red geraniums sitting on the little table. I thought to myself, "I don't want to stay here all day. There is a lot more to see just outside the gate. And the gate is not locked. All I need to do is push it open and step across the threshold to explore the neighborhood." I rose from my chair to peer through the wooden slats of the fence and I saw slivers of orange and purple flowers in the neighbor's garden. When I looked through a knothole, I observed a cute black and white dog, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, panting. But I couldn't see his whole body. I could only see the outside world in part. Why didn't I simply go over to the gate and push it open?

We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won't judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in this tangible way. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight.~Sloane Crosley (From Grief Is For People)

Do you ever feel you'd like someone to grab your hand, pull up two chairs and say, "Sit down. Tell me everything. I have time?" 

My husband is good at doing this. And he may not believe me that I see him in this way. He may more experience that I'm exasperated with all the tools he has--that I insist he put them away in a too tiny closet we have in our condo. That I scold him for all the phone wires looping over the lamps. I do this. Yes. But I also so love that he listens to me. One time, when I was formally working, a client of mine said to me at the end of the session, "Did you know that when you smile, your top teeth are crooked?" I remembered I immediately put my hand over my mouth and tried to stop smiling and muttered something like, "Oh, right. true. They are crooked." And when the client left, I pulled a compact mirror out of my purse, smiled wide and closely examined my teeth and thought, "She's right. My teeth are a lot more crooked than I realized." My feelings were hurt and I couldn't shake the fact that I couldn't shake off a rude comment. I stuffed my feelings in a drawer and thought how immature I was. Other people wouldn't let that comment bother them. Everyone else has their priorities straight. 

I'm a writer; I tell stories.~Claire Messud (From This Strange Eventful History)

A few days ago I received an email from a reader. She said she had finished one of my books and "loved" it. She told me that each evening after dinner, she read the book aloud to her cat, Sonny. She wrote that the book brought her comfort. She said she felt like someone understood her and she felt less lonely. Perhaps her words brought me as much comfort. I guess this is what every writer hopes for, prays for--that someone would feel comforted, less lonely, because of their words. And then the cat. Dear Sonny. A listener.

We all need comfort.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.~W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Over the weekend, I read a disturbingly beautiful book. Can the words disturbing and beautiful harmonize ? The book, Where The Light Fell, by Philip Yancey, seems to fit this uncanny description. Yancy writes of his boyhood in Georgia during the fifties. He had an older brother, and the boys were raised by a single Christian fundalmentalist mother who offered them both a steady diet of religious rules and shame. Yancey defines his upbringing as "ungraced." While in college he had what he defines as "the first authentic religious experience of my life." 

He says of his "vison" of the parable of the Good Samaritan: "A swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face--one I recognize with a start as my own. In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me--the apostate who doesn't believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless...all that evening i brood over what took place. It wasn't exactly a vision--more like a vivid daydream or an epiphany. Regardless, I can't put the scene out of mind...In my arrogance and mocking condescension, maybe I'm the neediest one of all."

He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food. ~Job 36:16 (NIV)

I happily read a book filled with beautiful metaphors, the prose rich, resonant, and providing me with pleasure. Then, abruptly, the author stated, "though I'm not spiritual..." I felt sadness that the writer was solely connected to the natural, not realizing the Creator's gift bestowed on him to write so eloquently, causing the English language to sing. 

Yet I am no different than this author at times. It is as if I am not spiritual. I become tangled inside anxiety, enamored with my own ideas, my faith in God expressed in sloppy elisions. I am consumed with self-effort, forgetting the expansive love of the Father. Burned out and panting with fatigue. I typically experience the rescue of His relentless mercy while watching a sunrise. It happened just this way a few mornings ago.