Stepping out of the gray is a phrase that has quite a bit of significance to me. See, I have this aversion to bad weather. I get the S.A.D.’s somethin’ awful. I spent a lot of time in the Midwest and Alaska. These places have some serious amounts of winter and a lot of gray days. To me gray is cold and cold is gray. C.S. Lewis said that he didn’t see gray clouds, but shades of ivory and white dancing above. What was he smoking??? Cloudy skies block the sun and the blue. I love and need those things. They give life. It’s that moment when you feel the warmth of the sun on a cooler day and lift your face up to it, close your eyes and breathe deeply in contentment. That is stepping out of the gray. My life was gray for quite a while. Time and events have been gifts from the Father allowing me to finally stop, look up and breathe deeply bathed in the sun’s rays. My header pic represents this. I wrote this in my journal when the days of sun-bathing were only a hope of the future:
The sadness I feel
Will be short lived
It will slowly begin to fade
Or quickly grow and overtake me
When love is real
Life is given
Look up the clouds are breaking
And down below my rose is blooming
Stepping out of the gray is my move towards restoration. It’s embracing my brokenness, not denying it. My brokenness is not a curse from God reminding me of my sinfulness. I accept it as Jesus accepted His suffering and death. “To Him they were not evils to be avoided at all cost, but as a mission to embrace. We too are broken. We live with broken bodies, broken hearts, broken minds or broken spirits. We suffer from broken relationships.” (Henri Nouwen) I choose love over judgment. I choose to have a faith that accepts Jesus as “over all and through all and in all.” And because He is I rest in His judgment, which is always love. I journey on in the outward expression of love for all of God’s children, my brothers and sisters. We are humans, we are created in the image of The Eternal Love. Shame is a lie, blame is not worth it.
I invite you to an awareness of this reality: that we are worth it and beloved of the Father from eternity past and for eternity future. I pray for you what a good friend of mine prayed for me last week:
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
I have been falling more and more in love with that passage. It just speaks so deeply. The funny thing is this. Though we would agree with this, we often treat God’s wrath/judgement as the thing that surpasses knowledge (well, who are we to argue with God if he condemns most).
I too have bad cases of S.A.D. — I can’t imagine how you survived in Alaska. Ugh. Seattle was bad enough for me.
I like the part, “Oh how I love Living IN Daylight Again”…not just looking at it from the shade or, pointing others to it, or talking about it, or singing about it, but living IN it. All the difference in the world, no?
It’s definitely easier to invite others into it rather than point it out…
“Love is greater than judgement”
And mercy covers over a multitude of sin.
Good word.