My word of 2016: yield hope

At the beginning of 2016, I find myself still in process from the previous year and maybe years.

My heart and soul are quiet. So quiet that it is hard to adequately communicate them with authenticity and vulnerability.

Last year my word was Psalm 68, and I read it numerous times throughout the year. This year I find myself needing a word slightly more tangible and understandable.

2015 was year where I left the heights of the mountaintop and fell to the valley for purification and refinement. I am not excited about the possibility of repeating it, and yet, I really don’t think the refining work that was begun in that year was magically finished at the beginning of this year, but boy do I wish it were. I want the hardness of 2015 to be over – to be out of the fire and into the sweet spot. I long for Heaven today more than I did at the beginning of 2015, and I think that’s a pretty good thing.

At the end of 2015, I find myself in a place where I wish no one knew my name. I am wanting all the things to be made new, but even more, I am wanting to hide in the refuge of His wings at least a little while.

Home right now is more of a place of weariness than shelter, but I am putting my hope in God that life settles and slows.

In fact, I’ve allowed myself to slow down quite a bit. I’ve begun rallying around the sweet moments I have. The kind word. The tight squeeze from a son. The pat on a back from a daughter.

I’m in the kind of season where you have to put on your own oxygen mask so that you can in turn put another one on someone else. I don’t feel like I have much to give right now. I am needing a kind of Holy Resuscitation and Healing.

I told my husband that I was thinking one of my friends was dying away, and he said, “Well, you have been through it enough, maybe you know what you are talking about this time.” I hope my radar is off, but I sense a season of quiet in friendships, in activities, in media, in just about every area.

Quiet is not always a good place for me, because it often means a place where everything is drying up. I am introverted and quiet by nature, but I do often find a lot of energy from people, but this time, I feel a sense of Holy Hush and Peace. A Gentle Stillness covering the weary, the ashamed, and the difficult parts of me.

At the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, I found myself reading Henri Nouwen and Parker Palmer. Two great Christian thinkers that I have heard of for some time, but who I have never read. I suppose both of them write from a Quaker type background, and both have helped inform this quiet repose I find myself in. From silence, solitude, and prayer to these questions:

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

“Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?”

These questions are ones that I have been wrestling with, although unnamed as such, for some time. This morning I put a word to this season I find myself in: yield. It is representative of the quiet I feel and even long for.

I will walk through the desert and find the Father and know Him more, and as I do so, I will yield. I will slow down. I will at times stop, but I will keep abiding and walking with Him.

The word yield means:

• 1 :  to give up possession of on claim or demand: as a :  to give up (as one’s breath) and so die b :  to surrender or relinquish to the physical control of another :  hand over possession of c :  to surrender or submit (oneself) to another d :  to give (oneself) up to an inclination, temptation, or habit e :  to relinquish one’s possession of (as a position of advantage or point of superiority) <yield precedence>

• 2 a :  to bear or bring forth as a natural product especially as a result of cultivation <the tree always yields good fruit> b :  to produce or furnish as return <this soil should yield good crops> c (1) :  to produce as return from an expenditure or investment :  furnish as profit or interest <a bond that yields 12 percent> (2) :  to produce as revenue :  bring in <the tax is expected to yield millions>

I hope that by the end the year I will produce something even though at the moment I feel like I have little to offer.

For my word of the year, I am needing a word to remind me that I don’t have to dwell in the pit of sadness and loss and wanting or be moved by the storms in my life right now, so I chose the word hope.

This word, hope, is a noun that grounds me into Jesus even when the waves are crashing into me.

My motto for 2016 is Yield Hope. Quiet, gentle, surrender. Beautiful, magnificent, peace.