Putting Up Easter

Jaxon's First Resurrection Basket

This morning I woke determined not to spend this gorgeous fall-feeling spring day before the computer gazing at Pinterest party ideas.  I must confess, having laughed at the notion but a few weeks ago, I am struggling with a party-planning obsession, pinning idea after idea to a cyber bulletin board.  Embarrassed, I must also admit “pinning” visually and emotionally gives me a euphoric rush, albeit temporary, and is my new feel-good and choice of escape.  Ugh – now that really is humbling.  OMNISCIENT DADDY understands, graciously convicts, forgives, and restores order to child who often can’t keep her balance in this world!!  FAITHFUL, He walks not only beside but inside steadying His children whether toddling anew, riding precariously without training wheels, or lumbering along cane clutched toward rim of gaping grave.

 

Homemade Resurrection Eggs

Now I sit on my porch, laptop warming thighs, writing -- not surfing (ha!), Heaven’s breeze carrying in her arms tangerine and white butterflies to share this new-life morning with me.  My heart fills!!  For several hours I have been putting away Easter.  When the storm blew in late Easter afternoon, like Dorothy in Kansas, I raced about the yard bringing under cover the day’s games and decorations.  With help of others, dishes were washed, and a few things put up where they belong.  Remnants remained however in virtually every room, begging to be put up, out of sight, until next year.

I began with the resurrection eggs which lay open, their contents spilled and jumbled.  Unfolding the little pieces of paper with Greatest Story of All, I sorted symbols and eggs and prepared to snap them shut until Easter 2013.  Like many other bloggers however, I just couldn’t bring myself two weeks after Easter Sunday to pack it all up without listening long to Risen Lord and His thoughts about empty tomb(s).  At this point in writing He brought to mind: “I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you today: I place before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Choose life so that you and your children will live. And love God, your God, listening obediently to him, firmly embracing him. Oh yes, he is life itself, a long life settled on the soil that God, your God, promised to give your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Egg Shell Tea Lights

So many thoughts have raced through my head this morning, I feel need to find the bottom line to determine my destination.  Yet God, like butterflies flitting about my yard, turning my head this way and that, assures me He will tie up neatly what He desires to say.  I invite you back to my kitchen table, where plastic eggs split open with good news like empty tombs.  There I snap pictures, and God informs me I am colorful egg of Easter, made to contain life – not simply a message written, read, symbolized, and shared, but LIVING WORD HIMSELF, EMPTINESS FILLING, LONELINESS OBLITERATING EMMANUEL!!!  I move next to discard broken shell tea lights dyed morning before Easter with natural juices and spices.  God prompts me to retrieve them from the trash and snap another picture.  Again He speaks truth over me.  Eggs must break, open, like closed doors on wombs and sealed tombs, to permit new life, and to form vessels to hold and emit EVERLASTING LIGHT.  How I delight in life-containing broken shells glowing radiant on table Earth.

We were made to want more!!

I tried hard over Easter to introduce especially to new generation THE FILLER OF ALL VOIDS, TOMB DEFEATER, JESUS.  Still just beginning to lay hold of the implications myself twenty-seven years post rebirth, I excitedly packed the day, planting seeds in object lessons, setting before wondering eyes the truth in living color, that we were meant for so much more; designed by LOVE as vessels for continual refilling.  I’d been thinking for some weeks about why we desire always more, and more, and more…  And I stumbled as if for first time upon INEXHAUSTIBLE FOUNT OF LIFE’S desire to perpetually fill us with the more and more and more we desire, FOREVER-MORE.  I of course had read and intellectually understood this, but in grappling with “management” of my own desires began to think long and hard about living with an undying appetite for more.  To think about the point of want, that is!

Tender and Nugget Celebrated Easter With Us

At times, living with want seems confusing business to say the least, a back-breaking burden of the curse relegated to life on this planet!!  After all, aren’t we supposed to mature and learn to be content (with less), to be satisfied with God alone??  Gluttony, greed, covetousness, adultery, all rise from a corrupt desire for more, right??  Logic would demand then that human beings nail unruly want to the cross – get rid of trouble-making desire at all costs, and bind and gag the deceitful heart from which it springs!! I’ve attempted to put a sock in the gaping mouth of my desires, and to cooperate with God in their refinement, putting off many until heaven.  Surely there desire will finally be perfectly managed, will neatly line up with God’s like good soldiers in His army, no longer marching to the beat of a different drummer.  What a relief heaven will be, no longer stuffing and stifling want.  Then I’ll physically be with LORD MY SHEPHERD, and shall “really” not want, right???  WAIT JUST A COTTON-PICKING MINUTE!!!  There is something missing in this view, I fear.

Night Before Easter Resurrection Garden with Sealed Tomb

God, GOOD GOD, made me to desire more.  My parents, Adam and Eve, wanted more while in their sinless state, pristine environment, and in rich fellowship with PERFECT GOD.  They wanted, and thus were tempted to want to be “like God.”  Note: they wanted to be like Him apparently over and above wanting Him, as lovers want and are satisfied in one another.  They had not yet learned how to REALLY LIVE WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL THING CALLED WANT, to trust GOOD GOD to make space in them for more of Himself through ever-increasing desire.  Our problem is not in wanting more, it is in accepting less.  We err in choosing not to wait (anticipate more than we could ask or think), and therefore miss the more of HIM we ache for!!!

Celebrating!!

Learning to be content has nothing to do with curbing want, rather it is the process of discovering the beauty and point of all want – embracing our form and function as GLORY vessels, more importantly wanting evermore DESIGNER ALL WISE, who longs to GIVE WITHOUT END.  To whom could He give Himself but to ones who want Him, who grow to trust more in their wanting, to mature in their joy-filled pre-climactic ache, to know more fully LOVE WILL COME AGAIN AND AGAIN TO FILL, ever expanding through want our hearts to hold even more.  What security He desires to give in context of want fulfilled, WHAT LOVE IS THIS, THIS ONE WHO WITH UNBROKEN CHAIN OF GENEROSITY LINKED US ETERNALLY TO HIMSELF??  He is RESURRECTION AND LIFE.  This day I choose LIFE to fill me!!  Thanks be to God for breaking off chains of lesser gods which offer at best temporal highs, for drawing me into Himself through want of more!!!!

 

Learning With Them To Want HIM More!!

Wanting Him More In the Shadow,

Terry




P.S. I recommend you listen to Earth Like Heaven, by Jonathan David Helser at http://www.aplacefortheheart.org/aplacefortheheart/Home.html.
And for more inspirational reading, visit Spiritual Sundays at  http://www.bloggerspirit.blogspot.com/

Great Advice to Ponder

COPIED FROM ANN VOSKAMP'S BLOG:   http://www.aholyexperience.com/

A well-known pastor, he was was once asked what was his most profound regret in life?
“Being in a hurry.” That is what he said.
“Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry.”
“But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.… Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.”
In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.
Haste makes waste. The hurry makes us hurt.
Whatever the pace, time will keep it and there’s no outrunning it, only speeding it up and pounding the feet harder; the minutes pound faster too. Race for more and you’ll snag on time and leak empty. Hurry always empties a soul.
In a world with cows to buy and fields to see and work to do, in the beep and blink of the twenty-first century, with its “live in the moment” buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync?
I think of this often, words of another woman seeking: “On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”
Is this the secret that all the life experts know?
That in Christ, urgent means slow.
That in Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence.
That in Christ, time is not running out. This day is not a sieve, losing time. In Christ, we fill – gaining time.
We stand on the brink of eternity.
So there is enough time.
Time to breathe deep and time to see real.
Time to laugh long, time to give God glory and rest deep and sing joy. And just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done.
There is time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green. And time to read and wonder and laugh with all of them in all this light.
All this time refracting in prism.
All this time that could refract in praise….”
::

~ excerpt of  One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are