Do you feel broken, today?

Ann Voscamp says, “You can be too broken to be.” She also talks about grief here:

 “There is no fear in letting tears come. Sadness is a gift to avoid the nothingness of numbness, and all hard places need water. Grief is a gift, and after a rain of tears, there is always more of you than before. Rain always brings growth.”

It’s Saturday and the day we focus on those families who’ve lost loved ones, maybe recently, maybe it’s been a while but grief has its own timetable. We pray for strength for the journey, comfort from the Lord and His people and for love to surround you through the numbness of coping with what must be dealt with. Jesus, lover of my soul, bind our wounds and make us whole.

Show us how to live, one day at a time, giving You glory. Your love never fails, though sometime our faith does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37wV6D49iEY

Of books, quotes and the unhurried life

“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,”Evelyn Underhill


It’s time for my summer fiction vacation and I’m starting with Dan Walsh’s book, “The Unfinished Gift.” I am already having a hard time putting it down, as it is very poignant. Dan is a fellow Word Weaver and I am looking forward to meeting him.

It’s times like this that I wish I could split into 2 people and be able to do what I need to do for my family and have one life to just read, read, read! I always remember when Mom Tinsley said nearly the same thing, but she wanted to be able to be a different person to be what she needed to be for her family (which I want to do also) and then another person to do her various charities and counseling work. Her daughter, Teresa said then, “I wish I could be 5 different people and they would all just have fun!”

I am also reading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are and it is a keeper. There are so many beautiful quotes in this book that I wish I could copy them out for everyone to read. I had been thinking about how I at times am in such a hurry that I am not fully there for anything or anyone, even myself and she addressed those thoughts in what I read this morning.
She said it so well: Ann responding to the above quote by Evelyn Underhill says,
“The hurry makes us hurt.

And maybe it is the hurt that drives us on. For all our frenzied running seemingly towards something, could it be perhaps we are fleeing-------desperate to escape pain that pursues?

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. The longer I keep running, the longer the gash and I drain, bleed away.

Hurry always empties a soul.” (Ann Voskamp)

Lord, help us to be fully aware of You and others this day and help us to give ourselves the gift of an unhurried soul. Let us be fully aware of those needs, hurts and the love that is right before us I pray.