for i am His

“Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life. Yes, the eternal God scrubs floors. For sure we know he washes feet. So take Jesus at his word. Ask him. Tell him what you want. Get dirty. Write out your prayer requests; don’t mindlessly drift through life on the American narcotic of busyness. If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don’t let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.” – Paul E. Miller

My heart feels like a snow globe being endlessly shaken up. It will not stop trembling—its contents constantly fluttering about, never touching the ground, bouncing off of the walls and ricocheting off of each other. It is not good at being still enough to take a breath, nor finding the will to settle down and write. There are many words in here, but they are so jumbled. So tousled and confused and switching their tones/cadences/rhymes/inflections every moment.

It is so easy to float through the weeks living in the same mumbled prayers and half-hearted assignments, scrolling through Instagram until I am numb and/or self-conscious beyond repair. My heart’s path of least resistance, I have found, produces a lackluster spirit. This path feels like a treadmill: it promises reward and progress, but in reality no distance has actually been covered. I’ve just pressed some buttons, and am feeling some sort of tiredness, but I am still standing in the same place I was when I started. It is not the victorious exhaustion of climbing a mountain; it is the defeated weariness of hammering and kicking away at the mountain, just to see that I have not put a dent in it.

I want to believe that in a world full of insurance forms and parking tickets and ignored emails there is a greater abundance of fiery sunrises and soul-refining guitar chords and raw, meaningful conversations and encounters with the living God. I know this, my heart knows this, though it so infrequently operates as if this were true.

The snow globe is settling now. The flecks that float about it are slowing down, little pieces of truths and words and promises of God finally falling quietly and patiently enough to catch the light. My heart is glistening with the slowness of it all; it is shaking off the dull vibration of busyness.

His pace is good, His pace is slow. He stops me in my tracks to marvel at the flowers and urges me to take quiet nighttime walks under a light-polluted Santa Clara sky.  He shows me new, old hymns that my new, old soul loves. Things are better with Him. I am better, with Him.