Whispers and Wooings

This rested girl contemplating the slow movement of fog across mountains, this girl with words filling her head, taking time to listen to her life-- this is who I am-- a writer.

But I am also a wife, a woman packing lunches, a woman at the sink with pruned, stinky fingers washing dishes. I am a wife who, after a long day of work, goes to the fridge to make supper for her man, trying to silence the selfishness, who messes up drastically in her efforts to love, who cries when her real, messed-up soul greets her face to face in the mirror of her husband's love-- but I am a wife who wants nothing more than to be bound to him and her Lover in heaven, and who will never give up on this endeavor, this loving. And I am the woman who makes such clutter in her cramped life only, weeks later, to clean it up again, and I am the disorganized, new teacher who stays until after 5 every day trying to muster up some ounce of confidence and capability, who needs to remind herself daily that it isn't her shortcomings that define her, but their little hearts, all 27 of them, bursting with wonder and love.

God will never lead you into something that is at odds with the person he's creating you to be. All of it-- he uses it all to form you. I cannot tell you why he wants me to be a teacher this year, but I'm trying to rest in the truth that he knows what he's doing, that there's no way he's letting go of the deep soul-stuff which defined me before I became a wife, before I became a teacher, that soul-stuff of a girl who wanders and listens and takes time to love the world with her words. This week at Bread Loaf was his love letter to me, I heard him whisper in the pines: "There's no way in heaven I'm letting this part of you go..."

If you're flooded with change, your life so crowded you find yourself wondering whether or not you can hold on to who you once were...know that the version of you reflected in his eyes is your truest, most authentic self, and he won't stop at anything to form you into that. He sees you, and he knows you, and he's orchestrating everything to woo your soul into who you were always meant to be.