Month: October 2019

Don’t tell my husband, (actually he’s fully aware), but I’m having a love affair. It’s lifelong, and it’s with the tall, strong and silent.

Naturally, I’m talking about the wild forest trees I live with.

I have many kindred spirits that adore a good walk in the woods. I have a favourite author who writes entire books that have trees wound into them as main characters in her life’s journey and her family’s home. She is enamoured especially of the cultivated, the planted, the intentional trees. I find I am the flip side of that coin, and am entranced by the feral, the forests that reach well past civilization but start outside my literal doorstep. The roots that flip and grow everywhere but down. The pines that house bears and moose and all manner of wild things.

I walk there and I see a bit of what God had in mind in the beginning…. forests that hem in, that protect, that make a home and invite in, that show off the reaches of His imagination and his creativity with chlorophyll. They aren’t tame, they don’t listen to anyone’s opinion on where to grow or how. They can be dangerous places, of course, I carry bear spray and avoid avalanche zones, but there’s something enticing in that balance on the edge of safety, too.

One of my favourite lines in my favourite book series calls Jesus in allegory, “not a tame lion… but he is GOOD!” I think of this every time I roam these woods that are free of restraint or pruning.

We aren’t guaranteed anything physical in this world, but we ARE guaranteed EVERY spiritual blessing when we are in Jesus. It’s not a safe life in the sense of the temporal. But it is the safest life in the spiritual space of things. These current bodies are not eternal, but our minds, souls and spirits are, and they are kept in the hands of our Father if we’ve put our faith and trust in his reconciling work through Jesus. We can walk through any wilderness of the mind and always be assured of water. We can walk on spiritual water and never sink when our eyes are on the Maker of the seas. We can trek mountains of the soul and never walk off a cliff if we follow the path God has blazed. Through all this, our bodies will get what they need to get us to where the rest of our being needs to be, as God says He knows what we have need of before we ask, so really, even though we may walk through deep valleys and suffer loss of temporal things, we will never lose what we actually need, and what we do lose will remind us that we didn’t need it as much as we needed what God offers instead.

So I’ll keep wandering the woods and stopping to look up at the ancient treetops, and remember the maker of worlds makes the path I’m on, and I can always roam miles and miles while never leaving the palm of His hand.

I’ve been Marie Kondo’d to death, she seems to be everywhere. She’s such a lovely person, though, that it’s excusable. Anyone else, I’d probably hate their guts now, but she is so gracious and gentle and kind, that I can’t stay mad at her. She’s made me stop and really think about what in my life “sparks joy” as her catchphrase teaches. In the midst of the minimalist and scale down trends, I’m finding that it is refreshing to have at least one place in my life where hoarding and excess is actually healthy and DOES spark joy: writing!

The more I write, the better I get at it. I can write in a million different directions and it doesn’t take up much space, and once it’s down on a screen or paper, it frees my mind up to focus on something else, or to take the same subject to the next level. I do tend to hoard books I love, which is a sticky wicket because they are full of value, but also take up room… but you will pry my treasured tomes out of my cold, dead hands, it’s the one place I take offense at Marie, that she says an average of thirty books is the ideal. Um, no. I have over thirty books in my to be read pile on my dresser alone, let alone my bookshelves where hundreds of my oldest and dearest friends live.

Writing is where I can be scattered, and the mere act of writing all the scatter down unifies and organizes it. I can start five book ideas, and then they live not in dusty, dark stone dungeons in my brain, they have a place and their own hobbit hole, right in my folder on my desktop, where I can visit and add more with delight, rather than have to dig out the map to the mind palace and take three weeks to find my train of thought there again.

Writing helps me take the objective out of the ether and translate it to the subjective. It takes my Gollum-like hold on an idea and put it down where I can properly weigh it, and know whether to keep it or reject it. I can file it as truth, or shelve it to opinions that may change, or “this only applies when __”, or discard it as a lie. It means I can take the heavy, full emotions I have over ALL THE THINGS and turn them into productive members of the society of my world, where they can inform or encourage, instead of just stay unvoiced or unresolved.

Writing gives me a chance to show someone else that, yes, there is someone else out there that is as strange as you, and give them words when they can’t find their own. “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14), I can contribute to that hallowed crowd, and be the second opinion someone needs to go from passive understanding to active application. How often have I needed that? To hear from one author on a blog some nebulous idea. To then hear a different facet of the same idea on a TV show or movie. To then read the ‘how to’ in a Bible verse, and then again, possibly from another author, that yes, this is truth, this is applicable, this is indeed God speaking.

It is not a role to take lightly. It takes making sure I’m keeping my relationship with God open with no blind spots, that I’m listening to what He’s already told me to do or to think about or to act on. It takes me being open to hearing what people around me are seeing and saying. It takes discipline in studying the Word, not with my own agenda, but with asking God what He’d have me see, and being willing to deal with whatever He brings up. In essence, the call to write means I have to know myself well, and know my identity in Christ so that I am sure of my calling and of why I want to share with anyone else. When I am aware of where my heart is deceitful and prone to wander, but also know when I’m hearing the voice of God through the Holy Spirit talking, and allow myself to listen, it is then that God can use me to hold someone else’s hand and speak what they need to hear, regardless of whether I know everything about the situation. I can trust that God does know, and that He will lovingly and graciously speak what is timely. I don’t need to preach, I don’t need to share everything all at once, I just need to trust and “do not be anxious about how you should defend yourself or what you should say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.” (Luke 12:11-12) and above all I need to remember to speak lovingly or just stay quiet! (Ephesians 4 has a lot to say about this.)

Writing helps me process memories and my own past mistakes or the mistakes of others that affected me in a way that can give freedom and help me learn what I can from those situations, and then leave it where it belongs, behind me, in a former self, where I don’t live or function anymore. Writing can release words that would otherwise poison the well if left to stew, and turn them into words that will heal and strengthen and free. There is power in the written word, it can make or break so many situations. I want to use this gift well.