"My heart will be blessed…"

"my heart wants to sigh
like a chime that flies,
from a church on a breeze..."

I was rendered speechless by Lady Gaga's "Sound of Music Tribute performance at the 2015 Academy Awards. What an amazing reminder to billions of viewers: never. label. anyone.

This week has been filled with instances of this very reminder. Even when someone has given you decades of information about who they are, don't believe it. We are not the accumulated sum of our human histories. It isn't written in indelible ink unless God wrote it. 

We are reminded in Lamentations that God's mercies are new every morning. We are new every morning, and great is His faithfulness to this promise.

Recently I was given the gift of redemption. The opportunity to be seen for who I am today, and not for who I was forty years ago. The person who gave me this gift was once a young girl I'd known when I was in my early twenties. I had probably given her every reason label me as a disappointment -- someone who had let her down, not lived up her expectations, and failed to keep my promises.

But even though I'd carried around my earlier failings -- like an over-loaded knapsack on my back -- she had long since decided to love me for who she always knew I could be, rather than the disappointments I'd long-imagined she saw when my name crossed her path.

The night I received her friend request on Facebook -- and later a private message that said, "I am so happy to find you," -- I bawled like a baby. She went on, in that first message, to tell me that she never gave up the hope of our reconnecting. When she'd learned from a mutual friend that I was living a life of service to others -- something even I might not have expected in those long ago days -- she said, "I always knew you'd do something wonderful with your life." Wow.  I was speechless with wonder.

There were many people who hadn't felt the same way that she did about me. Folks who didn't have such high expectations for my future. Including me. People whom I hadn't disappointed -- not nearly as badly as I thought I'd let her down. But her faith in my innate goodness -- and her belief in my promise -- were untouched by my own lack of faith in myself. I'd acted on my flagging self-worth, she'd refused to let it inform her expectations for me.

Tonight -- watching Lady Gaga's performance -- I was reminded of how important it is to celebrate the good we see in people each day, while still letting them surprise us along the way.

No matter how old we are, no matter what we have done with our past moments, no matter how often we have disappointed ourselves - or others - we can wake up each morning with fresh hope in our hearts. Hope that we really can:

"climb every mountain,
ford every stream,
follow every rainbow,
till we find our dream..." 

It's so easy to fall into a pattern of self-doubt based on past regrets. There is nothing difficult in going along with that storyline. Acting out labels we've placed on ourselves, or only seeing others through the labels we've placed on them.  But we don't have to.  We can do this differently.

We can start tonight -- by redeeming this day's accumulated information about ourselves or others.  Just try it.  Go back and review the day -- look at where you have made a difference, helped someone in need, corrected a mistaken way of thinking about yourself or others, shared, listened, or forgiven.  Then let this be your only record of the day.

And once you have claimed this day's beauty, grace, and wonder, take the next step. Establish in your heart that you are a child of God. That God's love alone defines you, your purpose, and your promise. Rest upon this one true fact about yourself. Then, be willing to rise in the morning, surprised by God's love for you and His unspeakable gifts of inspiration, transformation, and grace.

And while you are at it, be willing to give this same gift of "all things new," to everyone you come in contact with. Let their lives delight and surprise you.

You may just find that your world is filled with the sound of music, a few of your favorite things, dreams that will need all the love you can give, and a heart that is blessed. I know my heart was surprised -- and blessed -- tonight.

offered with Love,

Kate

"I have confidence...."

"What will this day be like?
I wonder.
What will my future be?
I wonder.
It could be so exciting,
To be out in the world,
To be free!
My heart should be wildly rejoicing.
Oh, what's the matter with me?
I've always longed for adventure,
To do the things I've never dared.
Now here I'm facing adventure
Then why am I so scared...''
-Rodgers/Hammerstein

It was a beautiful September day.  Cloudless clear blue skies, air that felt like satin brushing against your skin as you moved through it, and a temperature just cool enough to be felt through the sweater I was wearing. 

Route 80 out of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania stretched before me like the yellow brick road leading to my first real adult adventure.  I was leaving the New York metropolitan area, where I had lived since high school,  and moving to Los Angeles with nothing more than a dream and a small suitcase filled with two outfits and a few small childhood treasures I couldn't part with.  I was driving an extended family member's car across the United States for her.  My destination was set, but the route and the timetable were mine to decide.

And I was terrified.  Really terrified.  I was good at surviving, coping, and adapting to my surroundings…as long as my surroundings were familiar and I had a job…or two…or three…I could depend on.   I had stayed in the area long after my mom, sisters, and brothers had moved west.  I had a small circle of friends and a strong band of fellow teachers I could count on as my surrogate family.  I knew every square inch of our small town and I was fully vested in its future. 

But I also longed for adventure.  I wanted to know myself as more.  More than how I had become comfortable in thinking about my life.  I didn't want to wake up one day and discover that I had never pushed myself beyond what was familiar and comfortable.  So when I was asked if I could drive a friend's sub-compact car cross-country, delivering it from Manhattan to Malibu, I said "yes" before I could think myself out of it.

I knew that once I had committed I couldn't go back.  It was set in stone.  My friend would be horrified to have to go back to her in-laws and tell them that I had flaked out on a commitment, and I could never do that to her.  It was my way of painting myself into a corner that I already knew I would soon want out of.  

And boy did I ever want out of that commitment once the date of my departure closed in.  But I also know that I couldn't let myself down either.  I wanted to strike out in a new direction.  I wanted to discover more of the world than what I could absorb from all the reading I did…constantly.  I wanted to see and experience the places I had, up to that point, only imagined through someone else's descriptions in a book.

I wanted to see an endless field of sunflowers stretching for miles under a wide, blue Kansas sky. I wanted to cross the "wide Missouri" instead of just teaching children a song about it.  I wanted to breathe mountain air and swim in the Pacific...not just imagine it.

The late September afternoon I finally turned in the keys to my apartment, and set my little suitcase and shoebox full of treasures in the backseat, was traumatic for me.  That little historic village had been my "hometown" since high school and anyone who reads this blog knows that as a child I didn't spend many years in the same place growing up.  Six years in one town was a record and I had felt more settled, and at home, there than I had ever felt in my life. 

I drove out of town and north along the river towards the Delaware Water Gap, crossing into Pennsylvania at dusk and through a veil of tears.  As I started west on Route 80, a terror overtook me like I had rarely felt before.  I pulled off at the first possible exit and found the Sheraton hotel where a friend's sister worked as a reservation clerk.  My splotchy tear-stained face and  tale of woe convinced her that I wasn't in any shape to drive through the night. She kindly asked her boss if I could stay in one of the rooms that hadn't been rented that night and before long I was standing in a quiet room with nothing more than a heart full of uncertainty.

"…Oh, I must stop these doubts,
All these worries.
If I don't I just know I'll turn back!
I must dream of the things I am seeking.
I am seeking the courage I lack…."

After a hot bath and a call to my mom, I began to calm down.  I spent the next few hours quietly rehearsing all the reasons why I had felt so inspired earlier that summer to quit my teaching job, give up my apartment and launch out into the unknown.  I had trusted something deeper than human reason…I had trusted that, at the root of my inspiration, there was a spiritually primitive hunger for growth.  There was something so primal in me wanting to know that I could reach beyond my own limitations and expand outside the boundaries of fear and doubt. 

Those few hours of quiet, alone with the source of my original desires, was all I needed.  Without realizing it, I fell asleep waking at dawn to a brand new day and resurrected hopes. 

I washed my face, dressed and wrote a quick thank you note to my friend's sister for her kindness.  I was eager to begin my adventure.  I was 25 years old and the world was opening its arms to greet my dreams with bright enthusiasm.  I got behind the wheel of that bright green sub-compact and popped in one of the two cassette tapes I still owned. 

I rolled down the windows and cranked the Sound of Music soundtrack up as loud as I could. Maria and I belted out our hard-fought for/hard-won enthusiasm for new adventures with full hearts..and in full voice.  As the early autumn colors of the Pocono mountains became an impressionistic blur of the Mid-Atlantic's finest season I learned something new about myself.  I leaned that I did have confidence, but not in me. 

My new-found courage came from a place much deeper than the inherent limitations of mere human self-confidence…it came from the realization that something bigger was at the root of my desire to learn more about who I was and what I was capable of…and that something bigger was, even though I was a few more years from admitting it...God.

I have confidence in Him…
Kate