Cotton Candy Morning

I woke to a crisp fall morning, captured by the cotton candy tinting everything the sweetest shade of pink.  I went outside, camera in hand and snapped a few images along with my little chest dressed up for autumn!  I love fall, and the Author of it all!!

This morning the sky had rainbow polka dots -- promises in pieces -- decorating the heavens!

Love Ann!

http://www.aholyexperience.com/2014/07/5-truths-when-you-feel-tired-the-worlds-broke-your-heart-a-bit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HolyExperience+%28Holy+Experience%29

"It’s the hurting and wounded who are always the ones called to be medics — to administer lavish grace, to cast the messy in the best, merciful light.
The best way to tend to your open wounds is to open your arms.
Out-loving is the only ointment that healed anything.
Let the broken choose it:
When you’re most wounded by words, run to the only Word that always brings healing..."

 

Encouraged to Highlight Him

Lula Jane's

"Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports ... all others are games."  -- Ernest Hemingway

I'm busy these days learning to climb mountains!

Hemingway also wrote, "There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed."

I sit down this morning and bleed on journal pages.

Like a child's picture book, one word per page, God reads aloud to me, (and I write), "Listen."  In the distance a train whistles through intersections, faint voices rise from adjacent tables, and wind chimes ring above.  A fly appears, all abuzz, to disrupt.  I begin to take it all in, to record what I hear.


On my way to Lula Jane's this morning, mowed medians caught my eye, wildflowers disappeared overnight into summer graves.  Crows foraged for seeds.  Many seeds escaped to safety, driven under by abundant rain.  Little life-containers, they rest now, to come forth in profuse bloom on another day.  Like roadside wildflowers, I come forth in season, bloom, produce, and sow my own seed to wind and ground.  Seeds scatter and burrow.  Meanwhile, I'm plowed under.  Yet do I live, in a thousand new places, in countless hearts, stirred even if only for seconds.  I more than exist.  By grace, I bear fruit and multiply in my living and in my dying.  I'm eternal and about His eternal business.  I die, yet I enlarge my territory.  I spread myself out to ripple round the world.


I look beyond the open fence enclosing the patio.  Each square frames its own view.  I study a portion of the flag, waving as in a little flip book.  I recall making these on the edges of textbook pages when bored in school.  Still images flickered alive, and motion pictures were born.  Then my adventures were lived on page corners and in foolish escapades.

Wire frames flowers on tall stalks bordering the garden.  Herbs give up their scent to persistent wind, and chimes, played by gusts, sing new songs.  I watch, and listen to Him, as a feathery seed blows across the brick floor, weathered and beautifully uneven.  Seeds, leaves, straw lay trapped in cracks.  True life and great adventure happens here, amid the uneven stones, where swept into dark crevices are seeds, barely visible carriers of lives innumerable. I love it from this vantage point, from my comfy chair with a cranberry orange scone and a steamy cup of Ethiopian goodness, chocolaty sweet.  Much of the week, however, I live down in crevices, blown there by shifting winds of change and constant problems, pecked at by hungry (needy) creatures, my own kind, and sometimes baked desert dry, thirsting for relief.  I lose sight of Him.  Yet, He still walks the earth, tends to His plantings, transforms water into wine, brings forth joy from crushed fruit of The One True Vine.  Buried once, He understands the suffering involved in giving up life, in offering it as resurrection seed, thereby multiplying it to many.  He continues to do so in and through me!!  Still, I come alongside the dying, and at times, resist with them the grave, knowing full well it is the doorway to life more abundant.

You don't just lay in cracks.  For at the same time there is a work to be done, a Lord and a people to serve.  Thankfully, Rest comes to rescue me from oh so much self-effort.  He, my Sabbath, says, "Come to Me, you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.  Come, receive from Me!"  I come this morning, pulled as I am by the day's possibilities -- the opportunities to produce something seen today, to work perhaps in creating my own garden spot.  Instead, I come.  I come to Lula Jane's for breakfast with My Savior.  And He communes with me in the surrounding life sounds, carried on vacation-like breezes, and I know He is here with me, again.  Funny how at times earth's sounds can drown out His songs of deliverance, and at others carry them sweetly to my yearning ears!  I hear now sirens, bells gonging, cranes raising beams to build, cars going about their routes -- I hear busyness.  Thankfully, my feet are up, and for a while I'm privileged to just

listen and watch, and breathe in the breath of life emanating always from His mouth.  He performs CPR, He touches me, He massages my heart, resurrects me for another week of life-bearing in the maze of cracks that is holy ground.

The strands of my silvering hair blow gentle, and here in His arms I'm okay with this dying life that generates life.  But when I'm out there, I sometimes forget, and ask, "Is this where/how/when I'm to spend myself?"  It's harder than I thought in my Mother Teresa wanna-be imagination.  I didn't picture living in the throes of another person's death over and over, composed and calm for their sake, dying a thousand deaths.  I've entered the ring in the final rounds, only to watch one person after another succumb.  That dreaded ring with it's gore, regrets, questions, desperation -- it's where I too have laid down my own life beside the dying.  I've grown older here, much older, and lost my girlish view of things.

Icy Mountain Majesty

People climb ice for fun!!  At 55, I didn't know that.  There are ice climbing festivals.  Climbers ascend columns of frozen water -- falls formed on mountains -- resisting natural forces for the joy and glory of the climb.  This just amazes me.  Reason in part, I'm now called to mentally ice climb for a living.  Remember, I'm 55 and not real agile, still a little petrified of heights, and not a creature who likes the cold.  These images help me to reconsider my toil, to lay hold of the joy set before me, to view differently great and impenetrable walls, mountains I pray move out the way (and quickly), opening wide a smooth path for growth in my organization and life.  I'd hate to miss the party for griping about the cold hard realities, eyes too full of longing tears to see Majesty right in front of my nose!!  I stand warned, and warmed by the heart of God concerning His itinerary for me.

Exerpt From Late Night Reply to My Sister's Inquiry

... I am sure I have sciatic nerve issues, because it comes and goes based upon activity (or lack thereof).  Sitting for long periods is what brings it on.  At this moment, I have no pain at all -- I've been on the move today.  Or, should I say yesterday.  I woke up at 1:30 due to a nightmare, and the Lord has been so sweetly visiting with me all night.  I live in the best of times and the worst (and the latter depends largely upon my mindset).  I strongly sense God at work in me and through me, and that makes life on this lovely yet treacherous planet as a believer incredibly exciting/exhilarating.  And this isn't because I'm performing at all well in my own eyes or enduring a tough season -- there is some deep identity stuff He's tackling, and I have absolutely nothing to do with it, and somehow, by miracle only He is (I trust) benefiting others by it.  Ha, the joke is on my accuser who is working overtime breathing  hot down my neck, pointing fingers at God and me, all the while he's the Biggest Loser.  I'm tickled by it, really.  I only begin to explore and understand, "For all things are for your sakes, so that the grace which is spreading to more and more people may cause the giving of thanks to abound to the glory of God. 16Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. 17For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison,…"  My days are not futile or without aim -- and that way beyond what I can grasp.  I am trusting Him for this, and in ways I cannot frame up in words, because it is SO beyond me.  Faith has had to grow in my current circumstances, else I wither/perish (spiritually speaking, and not over-dramatizing!!)  He knows that when He brings me to the end of my rope, there We commune like honeymooning lovers.  It's what I need (and want, not in the flesh, of course, but in the center where my real life is) -- it is the blessing in my singleness.  Sometimes I feel, a widow at this age, "how come, Lord, have I been chosen to live 44 years of my life single -- to do it through all kinds of seasons from young girl to single mom, to middle age and until (likely death)?"  And I whine hard, until I meet Him at the tail of the rope.  Then I get it again, and I hang on tight to the One I married at Calvary and know (even in that place of every woman who longs to be desired, pursued, physically held, covered, provided for through an earthly man) I'm eternally blessed, inexplicably loved, and so deeply I could die this moment in the overflow.  Marriage may come, it is the lesser goal, (no god to me) -- it's like thinking getting out of debt opens a mystery door on happiness.  Both are good, but He, Himself is so superior to anyone or anything that to crave something less for any time at all is just stupid.  He frees me to dream, and not out of romantic fantasy or dissatisfaction.  He dreams in me!!!  And those are some REAL DREAMS, one's He makes come true, whether here or on the other side.  He makes me okay again with that, and I detach for a little while in a very healthy way from earthbound life.  I can tell He's been with me -- it's like smelling your husband's cologne all over you after he's long since gone for the day -- He fills me with joy, which turns into words ... and I hope He will now help me sleep...

He Answers My Nightmare Plea(s)

I'm awake, tireder than a woman ought to be, and yet He surges in me!  In weakness, His Strength I realize.  The mountain stands, unmoved, I in it's shadow, looking up, His glory shine highlighting contours of my admiring face.  Before this mountain -- this majestic obstacle -- I stand.  I hear Him on echoing wind, inviting from unseen storehouses of ice and mountain making wisdom, "CLIMB".  "Have fun in this challenge I've put here before and for you.  Consider the BEAUTY here, now.  All of it."

I woke from a nightmare - fending off a vicious dog, my arm clenched in bloody jaws, my heart to defend others who were with me, pounding.  I shook off sleep to my own weak scream, "HELP!"  And then, unable to go back to sleep, God took me video by video, picture by picture, into a more comprehensive view of my own story.  It wasn't just the belly full of Mexican food and Coke Zero that had me up for hours, but the night voice of My Savior -- sweet.  I penned the above invitation in my journal after watching Icespecter's  video posted below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVt7WAyQSYU.  (I wish there were not a four-letter word in the video, but to be real, I might have been tempted myself, and so for the value of all God spoke to me through it, I have included it).

I wondered what Icespectre meant -- if it was really a word.  I looked up spectre and it means:
 

1:  a visible disembodied spirit :  ghost, phantom; apparition

2:  something that haunts or perturbs the mind

3:  something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence. (a threat or menace)

And I pondered on the mountain range before me!!

Pondering.......

"His Words are like a flourishing vine growing inside me, attaching tendrils in dark crevices and on healing wounds. His Word dwells in me richly, and I am grateful..."  Jean Fleming
This post is full of rich food and invites me to continue pondering today!!
http://www.aholyexperience.com/2014/06/why-your-heart-really-needs-the-practice-of-pondering/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HolyExperience+%28Holy+Experience%29

The Climb

Jesus created, climbed, moved, split mountains!  But for the joy set before Him, He did it all.  And He says, "Come Follow Me."  Join Me, enjoy Me as we climb...

"Jesus climbed the mountain together with his disciples and the crowds that followed craving something new out of life.  They already knew he was different and wanted to know why and what he had to offer.  On this mountain Jesus taught them the laws of the kingdom of God that were written not on a stone tablet but on his heart and in his life.  Yearn for justice, work for peace, show forth compassion.  These were the very things that his followers had seen Jesus live out. They were woven into the very fabric of his being.   These were the things that had made them crave something new and made many of them willing to leave their livelihoods and their job security to follow him.  They were not only written on Jesus heart but became imprinted on the hearts and lives of his followers too – a new and living covenant that turned the world upside down in a way that the laws Moses brought down from his mountain never could."  http://godspace-msa.com/2011/01/31/do-we-climb-mountains-with-jesus-or-with-moses/   

Love Elena Shumilova's Work

Caged Light

Stunning

His Light Shines In Our Hearts

Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. ² Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. ³ And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. ⁴ The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. ⁵ For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. ⁶ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,”^[a] made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. ⁷ But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. ⁸ We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰ We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. ¹¹ For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. ¹² So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
¹³ It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.”^[b] Since we have that same spirit of^[c] faith, we also believe and therefore speak, ¹⁴ because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. ¹⁵ All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.
¹⁶ Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸ So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.  II Corinthians 4

Light In My Tunnel

Aprons & Basins

Make us servants. Make us holy.

Don’t allow us to overlook the overlooked. Take us to dark corners. Give us aprons and basins. -- Jennifer Dukes Lee

Joys Are Always On Their Way To Us

Time can’t dictate dreams or hijack hope or determine destination.
Time may have hands on the clock but it’s arms are too weak to rob anybody of hope, steal anybody’s prayers, destroy anybody’s joy.
And So what if time’s got hands on a clock — it’s God who has His Hands on the universe. Every little thing is going to be okay because God is working good through every little thing.
All that’s happening is just happening to make miracles. There are miracles always unfolding under the impossibles. 
“Joys are always on their way to us,” writes Amy Carmichael. “They are always traveling to us through the darkness of the night. There is never a night when they are not coming.”
Because there is never a night where joys are not coming to us, there is never a road that can’t arrive at Hope. Circumstances can go ahead and run out of time — but the courageous refuse to run out of hope.
We can always hope because there is always joy traveling to us down the unexpected roads.
--Ann VosKamp

Seen

Drawing In The Sand

Peering Into Night

Hemmed In -- In Light

Light Shared