The Untanglings

Sometimes its only when it's done that I am in awe of it. 

Like this past season. 

Here now again at the cottage, my pausing place where I can stop and breathe and muse, I look back on a year that was quite extraordinary in its demands. This even in the high demand reality that is my chosen life and vocation. This past season.....a LOT went down. 

Spent three months in Thailand, the scope of which in itself was beyond expectations. Got to visit the mountains and stand where I could almost touch the sky. My Thai family is not skimpy in expressing love, and the richness of that time will forever haunt me in ways beautiful and true. 

But while I was there Mom finished her time with us. And I was not able to get home for her leaving. After that, when I did get home, it seemed there was a rolling out of a succession of urgent matters that required the best of my game, an over and above state that just would not quit.  To even give a skimmed over list would risk sounding self absorbed, so I'll leave it alone. But at the very end of it there was the loss of a dear friend and realizing again the occupational hazard of being given the honour of doing funerals for people you love. 

So now, sitting in the healing silence of the sunset at the cottage, and with the space to try to sort it all out, a prevailing wonder has been how any of us survived and how so much actually got done!   Because in the midst of it all there were weddings with wonderful stories, and new members with energizing enthusiasm, and baptisms and babies and breakthroughs for people on impossible journeys. And over it all, a profound sense of God's power and presence and participation. 

Last night dwelling quietly in the final hush of the setting sun I listed all these grateful things. And in that vulnerable soul-posture, I was reminded of a moment and a song that captured something deep in me one night in Chiang Mai last November. 

We were at a Christian concert event and a popular female Thai singer named Rose Sunthip did a stunning voice and guitar-only rendition of Josh Grobin's "You Raise Me Up".  You can look it up on YouTube to catch the actual performance. 

It took my breath away then. It held me together in weeping moments this winter. It explains things and reframes things now. 

"You raise me up so I can stand on mountains" now has a depth - or height - of meaning not available to my soul this time last year.  Perhaps it was the experience of actually standing on a mountain. Or the just as real sense of being carried on the shoulders of God, and having it provide more than all I've needed to be more than I could be.  

And this not just for me personally. For Highview too, for aĺl of us.

That's the only explanation. 

Nothing else makes sense.

How else did we thrive like we did?

There's a settling of my mind in this testimony.

The beginnings, 

I think, 

of untangling the intensity 

and embracing the learnings 

and letting Him lead forward 

from here. 

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