Oh, friends.
Your faithfulness to me this week - it has been a balm of sorts.
The text messages, the emails, the comments.....
your willingness to pray - it has all carried me over the last few days.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Confusion is still whirling and questions are still being grappled - but I have had moments of hopeful peace.
Even as I published Tuesday's post - I felt a calm and an 'okayness'....almost like a pat on the head from Him.
More, Lord.
I came across a passage in Richard J. Foster's Streams of Living Water that really pressed in on this issue of hollowness and doubt:
"Often times emptiness is a darkness as well. We experience Deus Absconditus, the God who is hidden from us. Dryness too - a Sahara of the heart. Throughout these experiences solitude is our welcome companion, for we are learning to be alone with the Alone. Please understand, this emptiness, this darkness, this dryness is itself prayer. It is a heavenly communion of an ascetic sort. While delight is a feasting, emptiness is a fasting, and both are needed for the growth of the soul."(pg.50)
How fitting that this would happen to be a part of my daily reading for this week. And that line....a Sahara of the heart. Yes, Foster. That's exactly what it feels like. Precisely. To find words that match my feelings....it was a gift to me.
And then...I again...stumbled across a quote that ringed in truth:
"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." - St. Augustine
Yes. Yes, it's true. And for Foster and Augustine to have penned out these thoughts - it must mean that they themselves or someone in close vicinity...had dealt with feeling distant.
And sometimes - we just need to know that we aren't the only ones.
I hope...oh ever do I hope....that if nothing else....opening up on this little spot and hanging everything out here and allowing some vulnerability to seep through - that it has encouraged another flailing sojourner.
I'm grateful for the kind souls that wonder around this little space. I cherish you.
And I look forward to sprawling out for you all the ways He comes!
May love and revelation be yours....ours.....this weekend, friends. Hugs to all.
