The Winds of Change

Change is in the wind around here.

Up and out, there is that gray-white sky rolling in and chasing away the pleasant week of warm weather that had Seattle drooling with thoughts of spring. And deep inside, there is that sweet and constant feeling of life... a tiny son, sucking his thumb and stretching out his limbs. Reminding me throughout the day: "I am here.  I am coming." 

Annika is stretching out, too.  It seems like every month we make a new mark on the wall; she is literally inching her way into big-kid-hood. Today we went to visit the elementary school where she will attend kindergarten in the fall and as we drove home, she imagined the scene in her head:

"Hey mom, when I go here in real life, you're gonna give me a kiss and then I'll open the door and say goodbye and I'll go to school."

And once again my heart managed to overflow and break at the same time.

Now I watch the rain outside, soaking the grass and the ground and the poor chickens, and I feel the same strange emotion: a beautiful fullness, an overflowing satisfaction, a cleansing joy... and yet a piercing awareness of time passing, of my own inadequacy and stagnant, muddy puddles of the heart.

I've never been one to worry, at least not by normal standards. I'm one to lean back with a glass-half-full of something charming and seasonally appropriate and find a way to "toast" whatever stage of life we are in. I usually prefer to romanticize circumstances to point of delusion rather than over-analyze them. (I still remember the horrified look on my parent's faces when they walked into the cheap, smelly, cockroach-infested apartment that was to be my first home as a married woman.  I'd signed the lease quickly, believing the sleazy landlord when he said it was a competitive property. I beamed proudly about the way the sun lit up the kitchen while my mom bleached the walls, floors and ceiling.)

But as much as I want to idealize my way to a happy heart these days, I just can't.

I keep trying to figure it out and so often I get to a point where I think I have. I know it's about God whispering and drawing me deeper, exposing the subtle "yuck" inside that I never really believed he cared or even knew about.  It's about how he is inviting me to know him in a realer, richer, way more beautiful way instead of just cycling through learning and obeying.

It's about abiding, and it's about how I'm not.

And it's hard to know how.  When my days are filled with the small and the every-day, when change comes so slowly that its hard to recognize until it's passed, when contentment can come and go as quickly as the rain.

Like I said, I've never been one to "worry".

But now I wonder if these winds, these gentle growths or these harsher gusts of change, are producing a sneaky sort of anxiety that hangs around just long enough to distract my soul, and then flees too quick to be noticed or blamed.

So if the question really is, "Am I anxious about the future?" then the answer unfortunately is, for now.... "I don't know."

I know that I'm eager and happy and hopeful, and I think that's the ground that God keeps sowing. But I'm also restless and distracted, and those are the muddy puddles that I suspect he wants to wash away.

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