Gentle Me

Gentle me, by Ted Loder

Gentle me, Holy One, into an unclenched moment. 

A deep breath, 

A letting go of heavy experiences, 

Of shriveling anxieties, 

Of dead certainties, 

That, 

Softened by the silence, 

Surrounded by the Light, 

And open to the Mystery, 

I may be found by Wholeness, 

Upheld by the Unfathomable, 

 

Entranced by the simple, 

And filled with the Joy that is You.

Sticky notes and mud pies

If my brain were an office, there would be file cabinets gaping wide, saying “ahhhh”, waiting to be checked and cleaned and filled and drilled. Papers would be aflutter, seeking a superior filing system that would link them by subject, chronology, urgency, and importance. Carbon copies, relevant to several different compartments, would swell manila folders and cram drawer space. The repeating lists would keep me bouncing from cabinet to cabinet, because items affect multiple facets of the mind’s working. Mental sticky notes would clamour their hurried reminders from available surfaces all over the office.

Yes, there is a good filing system, but sometimes life doesn’t fit inside the neat spaces I create for it. Compartments like “sleep” intensify in importance; “meals” grow urgent, rushed, and nomadic. “Sewing”, “Sketching”, “Writing”, fluctuate between meagre, skimpy, neglected, bingeing, or guiltily remembered.

How do things get in such disarray? Wound into a tizzy, and overwhelmed by the foolishness and poor planning that brought me here, I don’t know where to begin the cleanup.

Life is not static, and cannot be surmounted with just mental systems and organizational rampages.

Life is fluid, boiling to a vapour, creating impressive sculptures of mammoth proportions that disintegrate on a breeze’s whim. How do I handle this fleeting, sticky, slimy, mysterious substance?

I can’t handle it. I’m not made to.

I’m made of dust.

I am dust, and life is vapour.

Dust and vapour mixed makes mud.

Steamed dust, moulded, dried, baked in heat makes bricks.

And what are bricks for but building? And what are buildings for but to live in? And who else but the Maker of mud and steam would want to live in it? Who else could make sense of all the colours, textures, weights, and potentials of my life, of our lives?

So I look up from bended knee, surrounded by the stacks of paper and dust and mold and possibility. I sigh, close my eyes, and know that I am dust.

I breathe in air and breathe out praise to the God Who knows my frame, and remembers I am dust.

Praise is His life in me, making sense of all my noise, making a way though all the piles I can’t conquer, making me new and clean and right.

So God, breathe Your life in me, give me praise, whether I’m being mixed up, blown on, slathered, baking, or drying out. Help me not make mudpies out of life, but yield it to You, and trust Your skill to make something glorious from it.

What could be more glorious than God indwelling us, enabling us to enjoy Him as He intends?

Does God Inhale?

Does God Inhale?

The screaming child upstairs: gasping air into her lungs then propelling it out in heavy bellows of anger. The gusting wind beyond the pane of glass: deporting rubbish from other neighbourhoods into the bushes and drifts along my house.
The words she and I speak, long and thoughtful, in the space of Saturday indoors.

Both we and nature exhale, breathing out as a result of life and heat energizing us, stirring the systems around and within us to fulfill their purpose, however warped our misuse of the resource.

But the Maker of screaming children, billowing Chinooks, and dreaming women, He is different. He too breathes out: but He has the breath of life, making a living soul. He exhales, and ice is given. Stormy wind fulfills His word. He thunders from heaven. Sea’s channels, earth’s foundations are laid bare and exposed at the blast of the breath of His nostrils.

His quietest commands outstrip our loudest hollering, revealing His omnipotence and our frailty in one fell swoop. His exhales leave us bare and exposed.

But the source of our exhalations carves the ultimate chasm between human and divine. We breathe in because He breathes life into us. But He does not need to breathe in. He does not need inspiration. He is life. Because of Him, we exist, but He is His own first cause.

So, melt in wonder, my soul, at the thought of a God-breathed, God-spoken story given me to believe and to tell others. Marvel to consider this all-powerful, self-sustaining, all-encompassing breath of God sighing out long and labourious through the chasm between us. He speaks the Incarnation—word made flesh—revealing the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person as God-Man. Immanuel, God with us. Logos, the cause of all physical and ethical life, spoken in Christ.

To cry as an infant, Christ breathed my air. To buy me back from hellish slavery, He exchanged lives, and deaths, with me. He exhaled His last breath in triumphant purity. To fill me with His life, He overpowered death, and breathed again. To seal His possession, He breathed heaven on me, into me, by the Holy Spirit.

He breathes life into me so that I might breathe His life.

Worship breathes His breath back to Him.