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The day God danced, too
It’s been raining for days and days and days. The sky gray with clouds. Puddles turning to ponds in the backyard. The bluebirds have sought shelter. Even the ducks swimming in the pond out back dart this way and that, pelted by the deluge that lessens then grows but just won’t give up.
I confess my mood falters with the growing gloom. Damp like the pages of the magazine that had the misfortune to be left outside on the screened in porch. When will it stop? When can I go outside? Where is the sun, the warmth, the inhale of clean breath I remember from a day so long ago?
Wait. What’s that? Could it be? It is! The glow of sunshine through the window. Throw open the shutters. Oh my goodness, run out in the yard, skip to the mailbox, spin in circles. Gather the whole 360. It has NEVER felt so good to be in a new day!!
Ahhh, I write on my chalk message board. Who can think of anything better to say?
Thank you, Thursday, for being gorgeous. Clear and sunny. Not a drop of humidity. Perfect temperature. As if this day was made strictly to my very own specifications.
… For a moment, I feel guilty for loving the day so much. I mean really, there are many days much like this in central Florida. There they awake to sunshine, yawn and go on about their business. Treating each day pretty much like the rest, one day indistinguishable, from the other. In the constancy, they are unaware of their good fortune. But today here in Virginia, I celebrate…
And then, for a glancing moment — really a split second — I look up in my reverie and wonder if this might be the way it happens up there in the heavens amongst the onlooking saints. That the day-by-day good-doers are applauded as one would a Florida day, unsurpassed but unsurprising, while the day-by-day sin-committers — the ones trudging through the driving rain, soaked to the skin, clouded over and covered in mud…
Oh, on that day! The day they see the light and turn their face to it, now THAT is a day like today. A run, skip and twirl kind of day. A day God dances in the driveway, too.
Play needs no purpose
Play needs no purpose. That is why play can go on and on as long as players find it meaningful. After all, we do not dance in order to get somewhere. We dance around and around. A piece of music doesn’t come to an end when its purpose is accomplished. It has no purpose, strictly speaking. It is the playful unfolding of a meaning that is there in each of its movements, in every theme, every passage: a celebration of meaning.
Br. David Steindl-Rast
Source: Gratefulness the Heart of Prayer
Finishing touches may not kill you
Finishing touches will kill you. Do you want the line to go up or down? the name to be this or that? is this darker or that? Should we label it or leave it alone? describe it in the caption or put it on the figure? And really, should this be positioned before or after, vertical or horizontal? It’s a veritable maze of decisions out there. And I’m only talking about the illustrations!
But I’ve come this far; I’ve got to finish. It might be tempting just to be done with it. Let good enough be enough and go on to other things. That would be the easy thing. Frankly, it would be the practical thing. But somehow it’s not the right thing. So each day I have to stare delay in the face and tell her (yes, her) “You have no power here.”
And then she gets angry. I know this because things start going wrong. Small things. I can see her throwing a temper tantrum. I can’t get hold of someone, can’t find something, can’t use, can’t open, can’t balance. Can’t is tricky, you know. It has sneaked the “no” out of cannot thinking no one will notice. But I have – in fact I just did, as I typed that – and so I am onto you, Ms. Delay. You who gleefully sprinkle can’ts around and convince me that finishing is much too hard.
I can.
I know this because God has already placed people around me who I’m meant to call upon down the finishing stretch. Some of them are tough. Some of them are demanding. Some of them speak sweetly but are rabbid about a deadline. Some just show up at my door, in my inbox or via text. There’s a whole daggone crowd gathering. So I think that must be the finish line just ahead.
In the meantime I am humming a tune that has popped into my head. The chorus goes,
“Oh I wonder what God was thinking
When he created you.
I wonder if he
Knew everything I would need
Because he made all my dreams come true.
When God made You
He must have been thinking about me.(Here’s the rest: New Song – When God Made You Lyrics | MetroLyrics)
It’s a dream I have that my daughters would choose that song for the first dance at their weddings. (Don’t tell, but in my dreams I start singing that song, and then they take over and sing the verses to their new husbands.)
But really, can we believe that when God created, everything He put in place came from a heart that knew just what we would need and when we would need it and made it so? Already? I suspect the dress rehearsal has already taken place in the heart of God. We were there, walking it all through, and now we just have to remember the steps.
Oh my. There’s gonna be some DANCING on at that heavenly reception!
For now, move over Delay, I’ve got work to do.
The Kinesthetic Christian 