Soaring

I saw another eagle today, soaring effortlessly in the clear cold blue sky.  Beautiful.  I like eagles. Actually, they make me stop.  They are the expression of pure beautiful strength to me. 

            I never had a favorite animal until we lived on Maryland’s eastern shore and I began to see bald eagles.  We are blessed to have these majestic birds living nearby.  I have been as close as a few yards away from an eagle taking off in flight.  I remember every eagle sighting. 

            Chris laughs at my eagle sighting obsession.  He calls them my “icon” because they make me think of their Creator.  God speaks something to me about Himself and myself and His creation when I see these birds. 

            So, today, as I reflected upon the soaring eagle we past in a field near our home, I thought about the New Year that is upon us.  I am tired, but the eagle was not.  I often struggle with lack of time or energy or spiritual strength.  The eagle just soars.  He soars.  Do I ever soar? 

            Rarely will you see an eagle flap its tremendous 6-7 foot wing span.  It waits for a thermal updraft to soar upon.  It will spread its wings and let the updraft take it up to 10,000 feet into the air.  Just by soaring. 

            I want to soar more in life.  When I rest and wait for the Lord to give me His strength for the task ahead, for the day, for the week or for the moment, then I am soaring in Him.  The joy and the peace and the strength that comes from soaring in Christ, far outweighs the life-sapping sprinting of reacting in the moment. 

            So, if I have a new year’s intention or resolution for 2012, it will be to wait, and to rest, and to “mount up on wings like eagles.” 

Have you not known? Have you not heard?

The LORD is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary;

his understanding is unsearchable.

He gives power to the faint,

and to him who has no might he increases strength.

Even youths shall faint and be weary,

and young men shall fall exhausted;

but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings like eagles;

they shall run and not be weary;

they shall walk and not faint.

(Isaiah 40:28-31 ESV)

You Run Like a Girl

                I am not a runner.  I have tried to imagine myself as a great marathon runner with endurance and speed.  Imagining is as far as I ever get. 

                The height of my running career was in my eighteenth year.  I met a Cambodian girl who was a cross country runner in my freshman year of college.  One day, she coaxed me into going for a “short run” with her before dinner.    Halfway through our “short run”, I was telling her that I would just “wait for her here” or “I will meet you at the dining hall”.  But, she looked me sternly in the eye and said, “you can’t quit until you see the end.”  So I shuffled on.

                I ran until we ran out of town to a long farm road with nothing around.  We ran to the end of this road and looked around.  It was beautiful.  After being cooped up in an old dorm room, doing hour after hour of studying, it was more than refreshing.  And, I had done it!  Me - the “non-runner”! 

                So, over our large pasta dinner, where everyone else had eaten and gone hours before, she told me how she started running.  She, along with her older brother and parents, escaped Cambodia in the middle of the night from a camp during the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign.  One of her brothers had died there and her parents would not last long – they were educated, which was deadly.  So, at age ten, she fled for her life and the family ended up in France.  Her family had relatives there, and so her parents gained employment in a hotel.  Several years later, they came to the United States.  In the years shortly following her escape, her parents became Christians. 

                In her high school years, she came face to face with the monster of her past.  She had gone through her own personal hell, and it haunted her.  She wanted to die.  So, she decided to run herself to death.  Day after day she ran longer and harder, but she never died.  She found herself praying and talking with God while she ran.  She also found out that she liked to run.  Running was the catalyst for her healing in both mind and soul.  We keep in touch and she now climbs mountains instead of running marathons. 

                I do not run physically much anymore, but every day I am running in a race.  It might not look pretty – my sin shows.  I may not run like other godly women, but I am praying and talking with Jesus while I run.  I may “run like a girl”, as my children like to say J   It gets harder, but I press on.  I can’t quit until I see the end.                                                                                           Your Fellow Sojourner

                [12] Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. [13] Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, [14] I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

(Philippians 3:12-14 ESV)

Bad Soup

These are the books that I am currently reading:

Psalms, Songs Along the Way - Kathleen Nielson, The Kingdom of God - Martyn Lloyd Jones, Confessions - St. Augustine, The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaiah and 2 Corinthians from the Bible

     I am a firm believer that for the Christian, good books are a means of grace.   For the Christian that does not read, he or she can only receive regurgitated books.  Regurgitated food may be somewhat sustaining, but not very tastey.  Why would one not partake of a banquet of choice food, yet open wide his mouth for someone else to regurgitate what they had previously eaten?   Now, I am not naïve to the fact  that there are great hindrances to sitting down and eating at the table of good wholesome books.  It reminds me of bad soup.

     There was a time when I refused to eat any kind of soup.  In fact, it was years before I ate soup again.  This was all due to an encounter I had with my father and a batch of bad vegetable soup.  He was making lunch one day, and some rather “limp” vegetable soup was all that was “on tap”.  Not only was I not allowed to decline the “soup”, but was made to partake.  I vowed to never let soup touch my lips again.  But, one day, I encountered a beautiful bowl of cream of crab on a cold evening. 

     We were having some sort of gathering in our home and as I came down the stairs, all of my senses alighted on a large cream colored bowl filled with the most delicious smelling soup.  Oh, and there was bread.  I ate, and I decided to give soup another try.

       I was not a reader until I encountered someone who was in love with books.  I said to myself, “Well, there must be something to this – just look at her!”   Then, a book captured me and reeled me in.  I wanted more.  I was sixteen and it was the summer.  Lifeguards  have three choices when they work at a sparsely populated country club pool.  One, become a proficient card shark.  Two,  become bronzed to perfection.  Three, you can read.  So, since the first two options were not materializing for me, I read.  

     So, if you are not a reader, go ahead, try the soup. 

                                                                                                   Your Fellow Sojourner

Truth! Truth!

"All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth.  I began to climb out of the depths to which I had sunk, in order to return to you.

My God, how I burned with longing to have wings to carry me back to you, away from all earthly things, although I had no idea what you would do with me!  For yours is the wisdom. ( Job 12:13) 

 In Greek the word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom", and it was this love that ... inflamed me.  

...the only thing that pleased me... to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly. 

...I ought not to have been content with what the philosophers said... even when they spoke the truth.  I should have passed beyond them for love of you, my good Father, in whom all beauty has its source.

Truth! Truth!  How the very marrow of my soul within me yearned for it...

My hunger and thirst were not even for the greatest of your works, but for you, my God, because you are Truth itself with whom there can be no change, no swerving from your course. (James 1:17)

You are the life of souls, the life of lives. You live, O Life of my soul, because you are life itself, immutable."

                                                 - Augustine's Confessions, from a time when he was nineteen years of age.

Truth Tomorrow

Blog world, I have succumbed to you. 

I am not a very good writer.  Trust me, I know some good writers, and I am not one of them.  I do like to share about my life with others in some form of conversation, however.  I was a faithful journaler for many years until the pace of life far outran the pace of my journaling pen.  (In other words, I now have five children.)  So, I see this blog as a way to revive my old journaling habit.  I feel like I finally have something to say again. 

It is quiet right now.  Only ten more minutes until “tomorrow”.  I am sniffling because of a sudden cold.  I cannot breathe very well and my throat is raw.  Yet, I have so much thankfulness welling up inside of me right now.  I am grateful to be alive and to type and to have to freedom to say what I believe in.

 I do not know what “tomorrow” will bring.  But, this I know, God is already preparing that time for me.  I will not step into the next day without His creative and purposeful hand already working there.  Why do I doubt, fear, and become weary?  I think I do this because I am human – I fight my flesh.  I will fight throughout the day to find Truth.  Some moments I will lay hold of Truth and be in awe as It sets me free.  Other times I will look at Truth and turn the other way, wanting to be my own truth – never satisfying.

 So, my quest in the morning as I awake to the sounds of children stirring and a body that is unwilling to move, will be to search for Truth in every moment and to let Truth lay hold of me.

 

                 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matthew 13:44 ESV)

                 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls,   who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:45-46 ESV)

From Your Fellow Sojourner,

 Katie Williams