I’m sitting here on a shady deck on a halfway sunny day drinking a hot mocha with whip out of a paper cup. I’ve already removed and licked the cream off the lid and am only just slightly bemused by the fact that I still prefer my drinks hot even in the summer.
The coffee shop in town roasts their own beans on the premises and the rumbling of it mingles with the scent of sea salt off the Puget Sound while bits of coffee chaff pepper my paper. You’d think this would be the quintessential opportunity for a blog post or an article or two to come scratching forth from my mechanical pencil but instead I sit here thinking, “Hmmm….” and “Well….” and “Ok then….”
I think of the woman who on Twitter thanks the Lord for dozens of books published and hundreds of ideas she has no time to write. I think of unfollowing her, and I’m thankful for the interruption of a blushing preteen boy trying to turn off his mother’s car alarm with fumbling fingers.
It’s been a float/flounder/follow sort of season this year. It’s sort of like having a very full mind but nothing to say, a little cagey. Is this what happens when babies stop arriving? I wonder about that. My children are growing–it is delightful. I try to suck in and soak up and absorb as a sponge the days of chubby cheeks and cheeky behaviors but it is much like holding water in my hands.
Maybe it’s time to nurture myself more, let me grow, remember the kid in me that likes Cadbury’s Flake bars and the smell of real wooden number two pencils. The grown-up part of me can say no to the discontents, the discouragers, the negativity, the crazy expectations, the rolling eyes and those mean girls that used to call me names in middle school but somehow have just turned up wearing other people’s faces. I can say “ta-ta!” to all of that and still laugh at the days to come.
I watch a man from the restaurant next door take out the garbage in a big black bag to be taken to parts unknown, never to touch his hands again. I trust Jesus to take out my garbage, too, to bury them at sea, that awful sign of judgment that came once before. I never want to see Him as irrelevant, unknowable, mythical. Faith like a child suits me, I’m finding.
I watch the tree swallows swoop around zipping dragonflies as I finish off my mocha and prepare for the bike ride home. I sure wish I could have thought of something to write…
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