Interruptions

So often I find myself caught in the endless routines of daily life wondering about the point of it all.  Routines are part of keeping our bodies alive, but I am realizing they can also become distractions from the real business of living.  More and more I see it is the interruptions, the breaks into my routines, that stir up and quicken my soul.  

I don’t want to be interrupted.  

I want life to be easy.  I want to be left alone to do my thing, whatever that may be.  I don’t want to make room for anyone else in my world, and yet it is precisely in the making room I begin to live life to its fullest.  

The irony is heavy, and Biblical.  You must give up your life to save it.  You must give away your life to enjoy it. Holding too tightly to your life is losing it.  A caged bird is only half alive, it was made to fly free.  We were made to share our beauty, to give, not to take all we are able to get.  Daily routine is the silence between the notes of life, the music plays in the interruptions.

Beauty

A girl with sad eyes walked around the store today while I was there.  She looked lost in every way.  Beauty is sad in this life because she knows she cannot last.  We want beauty to stay the same but she doesn’t.  She moves, she changes, she runs and fades and hides so we must always look for her.  

That sad-eyed girl was beautiful and sad because beauty isn’t all.  Beauty doesn’t stop the pain, it only promises something better beyond the pain.  True beauty is God’s hint to us of what will be when all is set right again.  When we mistake beauty for the truth toward which she points, we exploit her, thinking we can take from her something she is unable to give, something she was never meant to give.  

Beauty is a messenger and we are most moved when we listen for the message rather than try to capture and hold captive the messenger.  When we ask of something beautiful, “What are you trying to say?” we move closer to God, whose messenger it is.