As he told me about his new Big Vision, his wild dreams, I wanted to cheer him on from the bottom of my heart. The desire to cheer was, for once, louder than the more familiar one to voice my doubts and suspicion. I was shocked in that moment about how so often my knee-jerk reaction is to pick holes and hand out a dose of supposed realism. Perhaps I was feeling sentimental, because today – the dreamer won out. Continue reading
I am always astounded by how God teaches us so much through our flawed human relationships. I’m sure much of it even goes unnoticed – but today my eyes were kept wide open to learn a beautiful lesson.
I met with an old, old friend – a friend with whom I have journeyed the high peaks and rocky places. A friend who once threw up one of the most honest and painful mirrors to myself whilst calling out new and brave things from that young heart of mine. At the time, my fists were deliberately kept clenched, allowing what would have been such precious lessons to slip like sand through my fingers. I hurt and bruised in selfishness and ran away when the time came to reconcile. Those simple words ‘I’m sorry’ were too far from my heart to form themselves into words.
As a result, I never released them and he never heard them. Continue reading
Whilst in Canada, my soul-sister sent me this beautiful blog by Hilary Sherratt: ‘Love on a Sunday afternoon’. I internally ‘yes!’-ed throughout as she writes so beautifully on the well-worn truth that the most significant relationship moments are those in which nothing extraordinary happens – and yet you are both deeply changed.
I was so glad to have read it shortly before I would need to call it to mind, when an ordinary-romance moment was in order for me. He had taken me headlong into a fairytale, to snow-covered log cabins, muffled in by snow-covered Christmas trees and capped off by snow-covered mountains. The icicles were strident in their own perfection, the fire flickered in smugness at its own good fortune at complementing this very scene. A unicorn may well have wandered into view (snow-covered) and serenaded us. Continue reading
When all said and done, it’s those hours that I cherish. The hours spent in the green Jeep under the gentle watch of the sweeping mountains on either side.
If God is beyond our humanly-defined modes of communication and we each hear from him in different languages, different ways, ways unique and personal to us, we must each have something precious to teach one another about God’s love languages.
under the feathers 