"As a tale that is told..."

"Lay down your burdens,
I will carry you,
I will carry you,
my child,
my child..."

Amy Grant's new CD, How Mercy Looks from Here, launched today. But it's her classic, "I Will Carry You," that swept through my heart one night. I'd tossed and turned for hours.  I was burdened by a passel of stories lying so heavy on my heart that I almost couldn't breathe. And the feeling was no longer isolated to the realm of the mental and emotional, it had become physical.

As my husband rested peacefully beside me, and the girls were nestled snuggly in their rooms, I was wandering the hallways of "what" and "why" -- as if it was there, that I would find were a reasonable "cause" for the pain I was in.

I needed to think clearly, and the only relief I could find from the discomfort was in a hot bath. Slipping into my favorite middle-of-the-night sanctuary all was quiet. Buoyed in the silence of warm water I felt less distracted by the weight of the pain. I was able to listen more clearly for God's voice. And that's when the first strains of Amy's "I will carry you..." washed over me.  I let it's message lead me, and  I let go.

I opened my hands and released all that I had been grasping for.  I let my desire for a reason-able story -- one that would somehow explain what I needed to pray about --  fall away.  And I drifted ever deeper -- effortlessly -- into a conscious awareness of God's love.

The next thought that came washing through me was a Psalm:

"We live our lives

as a tale that is told..." 

Ah yes, this is exactly what I been searching for. I needed to be reminded that I could, actually, let the stories dissolve -- to go from being well-developed personal memoirs into mere words strung together on a timeline, and from word strings into a collection of letters, and from letters into strokes of a pen, and from the stroke of a pen, into ink that softly dissolved into the watery ether -- the buoying omni-presence of His abiding love. They were not mine, because they were not His.

The bath became a womb for my most childlike, pure, peaceful, and innocent self. I was not an anthology -- a compendium of dramas, tragedies, love sagas, and the occasional comedy. I didn't have to carry this "me" encyclopedia around, and unpack it as my identity.   It wasn't ever going to be a reliable reference for discovering what was causative each time that "me" wondered "why."

My only "why": "because God sent me into this moment for a holy purpose." My only thought: "Thy will be done." My one true feeling, "an abiding trust in Him."

Mary Baker Eddy wrote in her small collection, Pulpit and Press:

"You have simply to maintain
a positive, scientific sense of unity
with your divine Source
and daily demonstrate this."

I could do that.

Yes, I could always do just that.

 The rest I placed in God's hands -- joyfully acknowledging, now and forever, His supremacy, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

with Love,

Kate