Silence is an answer to prayer, if we allow ourselves to recognize it as such. Visualize a time when you were frantically launching prayer darts at God demanding immediate answers and solutions. Did you compulsively zero in on one circumstance after another asking yourself, “is that a sign? No. Over there, that’s a sign! Wait a minute, I think this is a sign.”
Stop! Reclaim your peace.
I come to the Garden Alone is my theme song, my personal anthem. Early morning is my favorite time of the day and strolling my garden paths alone at dawn, sipping my first cup of jasmine green tea, is the perfect start to any new day for me.
A show I enjoy watching features two men crisscrossing the country picking through people’s barns, attics, and storage units searching for treasures. I was gobsmacked, shocked during one episode of barn exploration when a massive pulley system revealed an equally massive yoke hanging from the rafters of a dilapidated barn. My mind went immediately to a picture of the poor farm animals standing obediently under this pulley system, waiting docilely and habitually for this yoke to be lowered onto their necks and backs.
This morning, I needed to feel smarter than myself, so I tuned into “Ted Talks” on my morning walk. It thumped through my earbuds with each step, step, step around my neighborhood. The featured scientist was explaining “what makes us. . . us?” He predictably started with the acronym DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Boom! I had a flashback to Mrs. Rigby’s 9th-grade biology class at ACS (American Community School) in Beirut, Lebanon.
I am unabashedly and unashamedly a scrapbooker. I chronicle our family’s ups and downs and turnarounds with pictures, mementos, and journaling. Why do I do this? Primarily I scrapbook because of the pure fun of losing track of time in a creative process and for the joy of looking back in retrospection.
Mary held her baby Jesus close to her heart on his birthday. She knew without a doubt how special he was, for hadn’t the angel told her so? I’ve given birth three times: twice to healthy boys, and once to a baby girl who didn’t make it to full term and never got the chance to breathe on her own. However, the baby who best taught me the awe-inspiring lesson about the nature of God’s love was a two and a half pound premature meth addicted newborn abandoned at the emergency room of the hospital where I had been volunteering in the NICU.