My hands have been more dirty then clean.
My body has been more tired then awake.
My heart has been more stretched then full.
The beauty of soft light filling my new room has become a gentle wake up call most mornings. I have actually started to look forward to the thirty minutes of crisp silence that echos the 5 A.M. wake up call from the lovely family of birds that has made their home on my window sill. Consistency is a word I am learning. Dwell is a verb I am learning to make time for.
I wish I could honestly say that I appreciate daily what the above paragraph explains about my life. But there have been several days when I wish I had a blind fold to block out the creeping light, the capability to train my bird neighbors to wait till nine to start singing their morning songs, and a traveling adventure in my near future.
For this season however, I must accept that Consistency and Dwell are my adventure.
Consistency.
Dwell.
They don't sound that scary at first glance. But to a girl who has spent the last several years bouncing from place to place, person to person…Consistency and Dwell are terrifying.
My mornings are spent digging my hands into dirt, planting seeds into soil blocks, intensely pulling weeds from garden beds, placing seedlings into earth homes, feeding chickens, gathering their gifts of eggs, returning the dead back to the earth at our compost pile, watering the living things, and then going to bed and doing it all again the next morning.
Very Consistent.
Time to Dwell.
I have wrestled daily between fear and acceptance of my place of growing roots in a place...in a city... in Nashville. I hated the thought of being in one place, its seemed boring sometimes it still seems boring. As I planted sunflowers along a creek bed that seemed rocky to me the parable of the sower came to mind.
"other seed feel on rocky ground where they did not have much soil and immediately they sprang up since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched, and since they HAD NO ROOTS they withered away."
I sat on the creek bank and cried. It was as if God wiped mud from my eyes, from my hard heart. I had been so angry that my life was the same that he was calling me to live consistently, that he was making dwell in this place…
He spoke gently, softly, crisply, like light crawling through my curtains in the early morning…
After all did He not place man in a garden to start with? Eden. He created it and it was good. Good, full of change, full of unlimited potential, full of life, full of growth, full of roots.
As much as I am searching for a way to get to Africa, I am consistently searching for the woman I am supposed to be… created to be. I believe that through growing roots in this city, being stable, being consistent, being forced to dwell in God, in Nashville… He has forced me to dwell in myself.
He desires for all of us to bare fruit, to produce flowers. But how can we bare such fruit or produce beautiful flowers with out first knowing where those things come from…Roots.
Places I am growing roots:
In my skills as a gardener. In my love for the children and families in Edgehill.
In learning how to live in FREEDOM.
In being apart of a movement reconciling brokenness in my community.
In confidence and security in the person I am.
In Nashville.
I am reminded again of the intentionality of the way Jesus walked…Close to the soil.
If I am to follow Jesus, then I, too, must remain close to the soil. Often I look up into the clouds and daydream about a better world. But my dreams will never bear fruit unless I keep turning my eyes again and again back to the dust of this earth and listening to what God is saying to me on the road of life. For I am connected to the earth and to all who walk the earth with me. Nature is not the background to our lives; it is a living gift that teaches us about the ways and will of the Creator.
