Bright Wings

This is my life.

Some days are a blur moving past the car window.  Rushing to appointments, meeting deadlines, just trying to get it all done.

And when my body is pushed as far as it can go, there are the days of exhaustion and sadness.  The asking of questions.  The answers that never come.

The pity parties.

Sometimes, I just long for some sunshine,  some warmth upon my face.

But at the end of each day, I am called to the leaving. And the promise of the renewing.

The promise that the darkness will not have dominion because the Light has conquered it.

My life is but a fragile web, woven with moments of skill, moments of incompetence,  moments of brilliant beauty.

And moments of longing.  To be known.  And loved as I am. 

And to love. Holding nothing back.

Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote in "God's Grandeur":

"And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Nature is never spent, and neither am I. Because, in the midst of the longing, He is longing with me. He is holding this flailing child close to his speared breast, whispering, "I know you." Whispering, "I love you."   Whispering.

"A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy." John 16:21-22

Something is moving inside me, being formed and transformed in the rushing, in the pity parties, in the longing. In the darkness. A new life.

When I glimpse this glory, His glory, and the joy that cannot be taken away,

my heart takes bright wings!