January 1, 2010
I can see the way out of the desert. I know which way to go. And some days I head in that direction.
The problem is there are other days I go back the other way. Or walk in circles. Or meander aimlessly.
What I wanted was for the desert to miraculously evaporate when I found the way out, or for the oasis to spring up in front of my face.
Here’s the thing about deserts. To get out, you have to travel at least as far as you did on your way in.
The only way to make progress, the only way to keep the journey out from taking even longer, is to stick with it, day after day.
Do what you know you must do to survive and thrive and get closer to the end.
Even while things are still dry.
Even when you can’t see the destination past the dune.
Even as it seems like it can never end.
Even if it feels pointless to keep going.
Keep going.
Just remember that God is walking alongside, even as He’s preparing the pool and the shade that will greet me once I find my way out.
April 8, 2008
I’ve been pondering this subject of love for a while—and not really getting very far. I think I’m trying to over-complicate it. I keep reading 1 Corinthians 13 and thinking, “It can’t possibly be that simple. There has to be more, there has to be something I’m missing.” I think it’s my tenth grade English teacher’s fault.
read more »
January 15, 2008
Patience. The first quality that Paul lists for love. He had to start with the hard one.
We have a running joke in our small group: don’t ever pray for patience! I remember talking to a member of the group who had a fairly young relationship with God. During the prayer time at the end of the Bible study, she prayed that God would give her patience about a situation, and afterwards we teased her about it. “Don’t pray for that,” we told her, “because that’s one thing that’s never a gift. God always answers that prayer the hard way.”
read more »
January 7, 2008
I wish Charles Schultz were still alive, because I think he’d be able to help me in my search to identify what love really is. He had the ability to capture a feeling in just a few words when he wrote “Happiness is a warm puppy.” Enough said. In that brief sentence, he evokes inside us exactly what happiness really is.
I don’t have the eloquence or the insight of Charles Schultz, so I’m going to have to go about this a different way. I need to take Paul’s approach instead. Paul breaks down for us in great detail what love is, what it’s components and attributes are from different perspectives. He tears apart the concept and rebuilds is for us bit by bit until the sculpture is complete.
But my brain can’t quite wrap itself around it all at once, and I need to go a step further. I’m going to take each point he makes one at a time and try to rip into it, make some sense of it, connect it to my reality and my world, and figure out where my perceptions and mistakes fit into God’s idea of what love is.
read more »
December 11, 2007
The second-most complicated concept I have ever tried to understand, and one that still baffles me, is love. Something tells me that understanding love is going to be a lifetime process, and even then, one that I’m never quite going to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.
So obviously my purpose in writing today isn’t to present a neatly packaged bundle of insights that definitively pronounce what love is. Rather it’s to throw a handful of partially cooked spaghetti up against the wall and see if any of it sticks. Even for a moment.
read more »
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=78dc41a2-ab13-4ed5-b34b-66c2b8198985)
