Life In Progress

                    

 

Though perpetually unfinished
My soul aches for completion
Though continually in motion
I wish for everything to be still
 
Though the news blares terror
My hope is to anchor home in peace
 
Though enemies scheme destruction
“Love anyway” vows to win
 
Though promised eternity
The temporal dominates my attention
 
Though all from this life must pass
I am reluctant to accept death
 
Though strength fails me
His Spirit renews me
Truth:  I’m tired.
The book launch was wonderful; the weekend with friends I don’t get to see nearly enough was amazing! And then Monday morning came around. My husband‘s been out of town two consecutive work weeks. The garage door broke. The cats have been precocious, like mischievous toddlers. I started the week feeling like I was seriously jetlagged, struggling to awaken my brain  to strategize how I was going to get everything done this week. Those are the days when I wish the race were complete, and I could enter into a rest that LASTS.   We live with this tension… wanting more from life, time to experience more, and yet sometimes we just feel like we’d be OK being done.  Not a death wish… Just completion of one phase to move onto another. And yet, each day this week, I’ve opened my eyes in the morning, and life has been ahead of me. My children, our home, my friends, bills to be paid.  When the sun has said goodbye for the day, I hear news of potential war across the sea – will it reach our shores, my soon-to-be-adult son?  Word reached us of ANOTHER sudden death that rocks our church’s International Impact community – the 2nd in 9 months.  Two high school juniors in the next district were killed in a car crash on Sunday – heartbreaking.  The pit in my stomach tightens.  Ugh… I hate hearing all that.  And amidst the scurry of a work week, it’s difficult to just sit with it all in prayer.  Our International Impact team of lay-leaders and two remaining staff met this morning and it’s clear we are still grappling with the loss of our 18-year lead staffer and beloved brother this past May.
Life proves to be unpredictable, heavy and utterly bewildering at times.  Yet we also find ourselves in moments of laughter, special memories-in-the-making, and filled to the brim with the loves God provides us as an extension of His love for us.
Like the extra nap I took Wednesday morning that broke the grip of fatigue I was in, so is the reminder that  the heaviness of life  we experience simultaneously with God’s love will one day dissolve away in His presence and His love will be all that’s left, all that we’ll bask in forever, all that we will ever more desire.
It’s exciting to participate in this real life fairy tail -exhibiting all elements of good and evil,  true love, villain, struggle, etc – and to have faith in a true, sure and astoundingly good ending.

2 Comments on “Life In Progress

  1. WOW, Andrea! in the midst of all that you composed a poem! Who does that!? Oh, yeah, Andrea.

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