childlike me

She pitter-patters into the room even in her four-year old body.

I suppose it is more like a hop-skip-leap of joy that she does.

She is my girl, and all the mysteries of the world live inside of her.

She is full of life, joy, and love.

She tells me about her blankie. I ask if blankie has magic. She says there is magic in blankie’s heart.

I ask her if there is magic in her heart, and she says no. She says love is in her heart.

It is true, and no one could deny it. I tell her love is the best kind of magic.

ooooah, she says.

It is love that turned water into wine.

It is love that turned God into a man.

It is love that gives my dying and dead bones new life.

It is love that turns the world upside down.

I don’t know what it is like to be famous or a christian celebrity, neither of which I want to be, despite old thoughts.

Sometimes, knowing that people are reading my blog makes me feel stuck, unable to come to worship through writing.

This past week a new reader mentioned the blog at church – my kids told me that I was famous when they got home.

And it made me fidgety.

And then I went to a service where a message that was preached that reflected my previous post, so I shared it with the pastor.

His response scared me – he called me revolutionary.

The me that you see is not innovative or contemporary, but…

love turns me inside out, makes me unafraid to talk or be and helps me to see.

love gives me eyes like a child, and only through the lens of a child could these words of mine ever be

worth reading or sharing or telling.

Love moves me to write in spite of me,

keeps me unstuck from people pleasing and self-consciousness and

whispers to me that faith like a child is revolutionary.

And this is the only way to be.

Even though I will always think of me as a wooden spoon,

Love chases me, and I come undone.

A radical alchemist child – that’s Him in me.

“Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” Luke 18:17

******

The truth is I am all tangled up in fear.

And even though I wrote the words above to encourage myself a couple of weeks ago, I’m still stuck.

Because this year has been a long process in which God has allowed me to sleep in the lions’ den

and be thrown in the fiery furnace.

I don’t feel like a revolutionary – but maybe children never do, they just are.

I am stuck not in the way of not having things to write, but in knowing what is okay to write

and maybe it is okay to listen to the nudges He gives that cause you to be still,

until the heart is refined and made tender

like the fire that purifies iron, and iron that sharpens iron,

in blazing attempts of perception,

maybe the fire sheds the adult, like a cicada in the summer,

so like a child I become again – fear free

by love’s renewing grace.

“For God did not give us a spirit of timidity (or fear), but a spirit of power, of love, and of self control.” 2 Timothy 1:7

ps. I’ve been reading Madeleine L’Engle. Even though, Erika Morrison introduced me to the beautiful blending of alchemy and anthropology, Madeleine L’Engle’s book “A Circle of Quiet” begs me to join in holy alchemy.

photo credit: irinaraquel via photopin cc