Sacred Smallness: A 31 Day Series

“With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”

Posts in This Series 

• Boundaries in Marriage
• Boundaries in Parenting
• Shake Out and Play, Mama (a poem)
• Grace Applied: More Thoughts on Boundaries
• Still The Loneliness Reeks (a poem)
• Things Reset
• Weaning 
• Contrite and Lowly: Thoughts on Isaiah 57
• The Gift Of You (a poem)
• Spiritual Boundaries, Part 1 (a story)
• Spiritual Boundaries, Part 2
• Spiritual Boundaries, Part 3 (Love is a respecter of persons)
• Spiritual Boundaries, Part 4 (The self-restraint of God)
• This Is What Remains
• The Commonness Seems More The Miracle
• Spiritual Boundaries, Part 5 (Treating others with respect and trust)

This is the real life, here. Now. This real moment and all this moment holds. This is the actual life, here, now: these relationships, these vocations, these days, these circumstances, these hearts.

Fulfillment is not someday down the road, or lost somewhere in the past. Abundance does not belong only to our dreams. Right here in the the toil and frustration and joy of all that is actually real – right here where we already are – abundant life and actual life coalesce and flesh out into something deeply, deeply good.

Becoming Small

To everything there is a season, I know. A time to sow and a time to reap, and in my life there has been a time for casting vision and time for taking it up, and just now I’m in a taking-up space. I’ve gathered unto myself my dreams and desires and have become (what feels to my heart) very, very small. I can’t explain this well – if you feel it, then I imagine you know. My world has turned inward and my heart has, too, in toward my home, my family, my God.

It feels like holy ground, this actual life. It feels like something sacred, to live it. I feel as though I’ve come home, and the coming at first felt small and then it felt deep, and now it feels as though I’ve wakened from a dream and have entered into what it actually real.

Last Year’s Series

Last year I wrote and hosted a very vulnerable and in-depth series for the Write 31 Challenge. The title was Survivor Songs, and the theme it carried was the idea that blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. The title came from my own on-going journey of healing from abuse, and many other voices added their own stories. Writing Survivor Songs was powerful for me (I loved it! So much!) and I expected to follow this year with a something similar.

But I can’t! This year life is in a very different place, and I have to show up to it and be present in all the ways it requires; thus,  the idea of smallness carries over here, into my writing.

Write 31 Days

This year I’m going to participate in the Write 31 Days challenge – which means to write every day in October – but I am going to do so with honor toward the constraints already shaping my days.

I am a wife and mother; I am a woman laying down other dreams to home-educate my six children (and my nieces and nephew!). I am a theologian in mind and and a teacher at heart, with a husband who comes before my writing, and friendships who -shhhh- vie tight with the written word.

This is what I have, this is what I am. The challenge then for me is to forge from the surrender to my days words that speak the truest truth I know.

“With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation,” Isaiah says. Transposing the imagery I say: Here, with joy I will draw truth from the well of the real life I’m living, and will write. I will challenge you to draw forth joy from your real life, and live.

Stick with me through this series! If you’re not already receiving these blog posts via email, you can enter your address here and receive all future posts in your inbox.

(Check your email  once you do, because you’ll have to click “confirm” on the first email that comes your way in order to receive any more!)