Thursday, January 8, 2009

So the older I get (wow..that makes me sound really old), the more I am convinced that everything....EVERYTHING is spiritual.

This week God has shown up in the strangest places for me. In a walmart giftcard, in a cup of tea (I don't like tea), in a hand-made blanket, 2 puppies, a tv series, a smile from an old friend, and the "ah-hah" moment of putting 2 and 2 together for the first time.

Does that ever happen to you?

Do you find the divine peeking out in the strangest and most secular of places?

I've always heard this and used to think it was unnerving. If everything is spiritual, then every decision, even the tiniest, has spiritual significance, a right and wrong answer.......and a consequence. Everything. Who can live like that? So like many, I abandoned the whole idea for a more popular "trust God and make your own way" theology. And out went the baby, his bathwater, the tub, and the plumbing.

For years I missed so much. I found "liberty" from the fear of a micromanaging God, but for it traded the thrill of seeing and knowing and tasting and smelling the God who so often reveals himself in the most "micro" parts of our world, a roadside bush, a donkey, and a still small voice.

We can't stay paralyzed, obsessing over every decision for fear that choosing the wrong breakfast cereal will somehow anger God. Nonethless, when the decision is made, we can still find God in that same breakfast cereal. That's the divine beauty of it. God doesn't need my perfection to make a way for Him to show up. Perhaps, He just wants me to take notice that He's there.


As with everything, I'm still figuring it all out (ok...hoping to figure out something....anything?). But for today, I am so thankful that God showed up where I didn't expect Him just because He loves me enough to make EVERYTHING spiritual.

Monday, January 5, 2009

The best story ever...

So today the janitor came by to chat.
He's a sweet man (though sometimes troublesome) and he looks like a pair of green overalls would turn him right into Luigi.
After a half hour, he told me he went to buy groceries.

I really needed to get back to work.

And then he said........

"I walked out to the car and they was this lady. She was holding the back of her head. She got in her car but was just a sitting there. She looked hurt. So I went to the window and knocked. I said 'Lady, you awright?". She was cryin' and said 'NO! I just got SHOT and my brains are coming out!"
I figured right there she's a nut case and grabbed the store manager and told him he had a crazy lady in the parking lot. They called the police. He came out and kept trying to get her to open the door but she wouldn't take her hands off her head. Kept sayin' she got shot and her brains was a comin' out. The policeman finally had to break the window...and you won't believe it. I just saw it and walked a lady. That dad-gum lady went grocery shoppin' and had been right by the canned biscuits when one exploded. And you know what was on the back of her head?...."

Wow...that's amazing.