Winter blows her last goodbye winds as she leaves in her wake the dregs of anything and everything that she helped to expose. For perhaps winter is always working to expose the things beneath the surface that are needing and groaning for the newness of life.
She leaves things like the tree felled by the weight of ice and the fence splintered through under its weight.
And she leaves too the good things felled by the weight of icy fear inside the heart, and hopes and plans fractured through with the weight of questions.
What is it to have things exposed again and again? What is it to walk into newness over and over? What is it to spin the same kinds of circles, season after dizzy season? What is it to fall down hard just as you begin to feel so free?
What is it?
Is this what it is to be dust? Is this the best place to remember that He made us from dust on purpose, for a purpose, and that He, Himself is faithful to remember that we are dust?
Gen. 2:7. Ps. 103:13-18. Ps. 143:1-2.
For He has always been the God who remembers when we don’t, the God who delights in hearing His own lovely song be sung from the place of dust, the God who loves for ashes to be the thing that He takes in His hands from which to make beauty.
Certainly only a God who can tell the light to shine out of darkness, could speak the word that would let light shine into this dust and into these hearts (2 Cor. 4:6). Surely only He could let our hearts hear and feel the Song that rests us and returns us repeated in the knowing that these exposed places inside of us, do not diminish even slightly His own ability to shine light out of darkness. Nor could any weak place inside of any of His own children who have even a mustard seed of a prayer for faith, ever hinder the cause of our own personal supporter and Friend Jesus, who constantly recommends to the Father on the basis of His own blood the beauty of the cause that He forever sees in these hearts that He has bought and eternally redeemed secure (1 John 2:1-2).
And when the winter exposed so much inside us that had no strength and leaves us in a heap of so many ashes that it doesn’t make any kind of earthly sense to go on singing, when it doesn’t seem that you have any positive right to sing at all, or do anything more than to lay down and rot in the ashes (Ps. 143:3-4), when this is where winter begins to bid us farewell, just as she has done before… even here, there is a song that is not our own, and in the quiet of the soul even in a heap of ashes, the faint hum of the Spirit of God within can still be heard (Jn. 7:38-39), an echo faint and sure. It is ringing with the longing of what light He desires to sing in us. And it is a song that cannot be silenced by anything exposed in the winter.
So even while the winter has not fully ended yet, and even while it is still dark, one could listen to the longing hum of the Spirit of God, the desiring melody of the Spirit that still dwells deep within all who are in Christ, in the face of the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:17). And in the security of that sure hum that still resides underneath everything else, one could go on and sing a song right there in the place that you are.
So sing.
Sing out a prayer. Sing with a heart that still knows how to smile and knows too that tears matter and one can go on learning how to reach out for support. Sing with hands joining hands and feet that find places of love to go still, the shared humanity of joined brokenness and grace all around, all of us in need of this same love. Sing with a soul that knows that it is only by the blood of Jesus that it has every heavenly right to go on singing about the song of perfect love that it has been so deeply loved by.
Rest. Do what is needed to let your heart rest and see the choices that are yours to make about the fragile places inside you that need extra quiet and care to help them rest into the Spirit and be quieted by the Father’s own Love. Ps. 46:10, Zeph. 3:17, Ps. 143:8, Mt. 11:28-29.
And carry on with the grace of the Spirit’s song as one who is…
armed to resist your opponent, (Eph. 6:11, 1 Pet. 5:8-9)
cleansed through confession by His blood, (1 Jn. 1:9)
confident before the throne of grace, (Heb. 4:16)
sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, (Heb. 10:21-23)
pursuing righteousness, faith, love and peace with all who call on him purehearted, (2 Tim. 2:22)
laying aside every weight of sin and running with endurance the race that is set before you.
(Heb. 12:1-2)
And do not lose heart, but rather, with every last bit of any mustard seed prayer you have, keep your heart with the wild vastness of its groaning and yearning and longing
and believe. For the promise is sure: “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Phil 1:6.
May your heart never cease wild hoping in the newness of spring and the life of the resurrection.
Rom. 8:11.
And may the circles of seasons spun before be transformed from a weary remembering, to a blessed remembering of His own faithful works to continually carry you through, a faithfulness that never will fail you nor let you go. Ps. 143:5-6. Isa. 41:10. Ps. 94:12-15
Amen.
Psalm 143.
…
“...Answer me quickly, O Lord! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord! I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground! For your name’s sake, O Lord, preserve my life! In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble! And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.”
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