blog ~ faith ~ family ~ heartlife
This is my first ever attempt at painting with oils… palette knives… and of using the easel my Dad made for me 18 months ago. It came about when a few different things came together. The desire to paint, the specific idea – and a challenge I received to stop taking in extra information for a week. Lo and behold some deeper thoughts of my own made their way through – and some time to be creative in a range of ways.
Continue reading “Pivot”
There is something about being with someone who understands. Someone who’s been through that same thing you have. There is a look that passes between two people who’ve walked the same thing – horrific to hilarious or anything in between – that no words can bring depth to. It is already known through and through.
Continue reading “The One Who Understands”
Part 1 written 15 November 2017
Part 2 written 10 November 2018
I thank you God for morning
For the freshness that comes
With the dew and the dawn
A new day
With a little distance from yesterday’s hurts
Received and inflicted
Known and unknown
Oh Tilly
How did I know you but – Not?
How did I look in your smiling eyes
And not see the pain behind?
How did we talk so long and so deep
But still not deep enough?
Oh Lord – he’s 10.
He’s 10 with a broken brain.
Can you mend a 10 year old broken brain?
Of course you can. I know that. But will you?
Would you?
Oh Lord he’s 10.
Or 11.
Maybe he was 10 when he did it and 11 now.
But his brain got broken a long time ago.
This doesn’t just ‘happen’
Are you in the business of mending broken brains?
Sometimes I don’t think so.
But what if that’s because we only see the ones that didn’t get mended.
– or haven’t yet.
What if you’ve mended more brains that we could ever know
Because we haven’t seen the effects of the brokenness?
Oh Lord, he’s 10. Or 11.
Does it even matter?
You Who dwells outside of our now – do you see the man he ‘is’ in a simple pivot of the line of time? Is he a monster? Is he fixable?
Oh Lord – a broken boy.
Please God might you mend him?
Might you put your people around him to help him heal?
Would you protect others in the now, and in the future, from the spread of this specific sadness?
Would you?
Oh Lord he’s 10.
So many fearful others, so sure of the ‘should haves’.
And would I be too in their position?
Oh Lord – the other broken boy.
Heal, protect, love, tear down, build up, surround and restore.
How long oh Lord.
How long.
He’s 8.
Oh Lord.
Written after one boy abused another at a local school.
Poor Jim.
He flipped
And he flopped
And he died.
But not on our watch.
The end.
Written when Jim returned home with great relief for having survived us – having been very suspensfully fish-sat at our house. 🙂
There are both similarities and differences between a dietary detox and a spiritual one. They’re both beneficial. They can both have uncomfortable results before reaching the benefits and they can both lead to new places of understanding.
Continue reading “Detox”
To the tune of “99 Bottles of Beer” – written after 20 years of our kids attending school – taking the last two out to start homeschooling! <3
9000 trips to school on my clock,
9000 trips to school
You take them down and turn around
9000 trips to school.
SEE
1
See yourself.
See yourself standing in your spot on the planet.
See yourself in your spot on the planet
as a singular dot existing in a sphere of time.
See your dot on the planet in the sphere of time within another sphere
called “the lower heavens”.
See your dot on the planet in its place in time in the lower heavens
in the never-ending multi-dimension called eternity.