Category: Grace

Celebrating, Cheering, Rejoicing —Life (With Words, Always)

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 3 Comments

I had lunch with a friend last week and she said something profound.  Profoundly simple.  I just live everyday like its the last.

And I want to too.  So a good place to start is with celebrating life and all that’s worth celebrating about it.  Daily.  In the ordinary.  In the mundane.  In the big and in the small. In the minutae and in the grand.  The footnote asterisk moments, and the all out worthy of champagne and caviar celebrations.  The all.  The package.  The whole entire messy and grandness of it all.

Around here today, this momma’s heart is celebrating.

So I write.  I write to celebrate and mark the worthy and the good. To describe the layers of living and life.  Tear stained keyboard marking milestones. Sweet and bitter co-mingling on the tongue-tip places. Tasting the past.  Savoring time since birthing a firstborn son into a world where he becomes the teacher, an anchor, a place to look for inspiration. A place to go for contagious exuberant passion for life and all that it grants.

Time blurs in the remembering. So I write.  And the fingers, the heart, the mind, and memories meld together and weave in and around, back and forth, and swirl up the all good.

I write and remember.  Track back and gather up. Gather up moments, milestones, time and time spent.  Ways love appeared and  the ways love was shown. Beautiful expressions of love.  Deeply handsome gestures of care, concern, love, and compassion.

I write to proclaim and give voice to the story.  A good story worth telling in bold and in all caps.  A story starting with love in love and continually marked by love.  Bookmarked with good and great and worthy of being raised up.

A story of a boy becoming a man.  Growing in manhood.  Tenderly, kindly, strongly, compassionately walking out love.  For His God.  For His family.  For his friends.  For others.

A story of gentleness and a passion for life and creation.  For the small in the world, the fragile, all that God created with feathers, and wings, and fur, and skin.

A story of caring.  Caring deeply for others, always.  A story of a heart which seeks to nurture  and love.  To protect and pour into.  Standing firm in Faith.  Standing firm in Family.  Going long, running hard after friendship.  Always digging deep into work, into love.

Happy Day of Your Birth.  Happy you have made me.  Joyful, joyful I adore you.  

Your life is a beautiful praise song to God.  You love all His creatures and you love His people in a way that touches deep in me.  You have woven your love throughout our family, always caring and searching for the needs of others.

Thank you for walking back into this home, my man-child, your passions, your joy, your love and your hopes.  Grateful for your strong tethered heart to this home and this momma.  I weep with joy, I weep with gratitude.

Happy Birthday, my son, I love you.

When we celebrate life, we celebrate Him, the Giver of all great gifts.  Thank you Father God for pouring out so richly into this life, this home, this day.

And all God’s people say “Amen.”

Amen.

Seeing More Clearly Through A Lense of Grace and Mercy

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ Leave a comment

Blinded by the light.  Its difficult to see.  Feeling unsafe behind the wheel.  Hoping to be home and safe soon.  I am vulnerable and I am challenged. The eye doctor dilates my eyes and every ray of sun causes a wince, bringing hand to eye for cover and protection. I am not seeing well.  I am not seeing clearly.  I want to go home. I know this is temporary.  I am certain my vision will improve.  I’ve been told it will take two hours.  But in this time I am reminded of what it feels like to see unclearly, to see the world in a blur, missing detail.  Things are askew.  Things are murky, cloudy and off a beat a bit. There are so many times when I do not see the what’s right there. Someone has unspoken pain and I do not see the what’s behind the surface. Someone is struggling with a life circumstance and I do not see clearly the effect it has on words and actions. There is a hidden fact or emotion which I do not see, cannot see, or even will not see. Things are hidden away.  Buried down deep. Out of sight. Out of plain view.  Things that require sweet Mercy and Grace to see with tenderness and understanding.  Like my dilated eyes preventing clarity, the blur of the eyes of the heart can slant and cripple,distort  the ability to see with Kingdom Eyes.   “You can’t go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see”. — C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man”. But when I put on the lense of Grace and my heart looks out through a lense of Mercy, I begin to see with understanding and love.  The facts or circumstances causing the blurry are less important.  The pieces of the puzzle missing matter less now.  My eyes are more aligned with the heart of God.  Mercifully I see.  The blur of pain causing a skewed understanding fades when I look in love.  His love.  Handicapped on my own.  Unable to see clearly without Him.  Needing the corrective lense on life of the spirit of God, needing a shift in my fleshy perspective, needing a glimpse of His people through the eyes of Jesus.“The litmus test of our love for God is our love of neighbor.” — Brennan Manning.

I want to see clearly, lovingly, tenderly, mercifully.  And I want to see past and through the circumstances- both my own and those of others.  I want to see the hard to see places and yet see nothing, embracing and loving the hard and the unlovable.  Loving in an all out way where all becomes invisible in love but that which matters.  They are my family, my friends, my neighbors. I want to love Gracefully and Mercifully in the blur of life, the blur of pain, the blur of hurt, and the blur of circumstances.

Eyes of Mercy and Eyes of Grace shift perspective, shift view, and opinion and judgement.  A lense of Grace and a lense of Love allow compassion and tenderness to focus the eyes of the heart lovingly, kindly, and oh so sweetly to see Beauty each and every time.  To see the shadow of the Cross and the bright clear love reigning down from Heaven.

My vision is still off.  I feel the sting of the blurr of my vision being manipulated by the doctor.  And I know how fragile the eyes are, especially the eyes of my heart.  I know how quickly I am prone to look out not in love, but in judgement, in criticism, in hyper-sensitivity and without empathy.

So I lean hard on Him as a blind woman leans on a cane.  Crippled am I, handicapped am I without any strength on my own.  With the vision of a sinner, blind to others, stumbling into others, running hard into pain and causing it myself, I need the Shephard’s staff.

Mercifully He offers.  Mercifully He leads.

Amazing Grace.  A view of life like no other, through the lense of Grace.

Five Ways To Slow Down and Yield To Grace

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ Leave a comment

Five Ways Slowing Down Can Yield to Grace:

One –  Slow down the tongue  so  words may give way to Grace.

Two – Slow down judgement,  making way for forgiveness, an apology and reconciliation.

Three– Slow down and listen to a child when she/he speaks, looking them in the eyes and holding hard in love to the thoughts of their heart and the words of their mouth, finding Joy in the gift of their speech.

 Four – Slow down thoughts of  despair and discouragement, making way for  Hope restored, Hope reborn.

Five – Slow down an agenda, a plan, a goal, making way for God’s will, His Grace and His Best in all things.

 

And oh you know this list is written for Me.  And oh you know how many, so very many more I have thought of and want to add.  In trying to keep it simple, I am stopping at five. But you can add yours.

How do you slow down and make room for grace-filled living?

How do you find ways to slow down and savor the all that He wants for us, all that He has for us.

You can encourage others by leaving a comment and slowly shift our eyes to new ways to slow down and yield to Him and to His Grace in our lives.

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Thank you for your response. ✨

How Sidewalk Chalk And Poetry Can Inspire

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 4 Comments

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” –Pablo Picasso

Walk out into wonder.  Walk out expectant.

Get lost in a sea of color, be ushered into art by Joy.

Meet hunched over concrete artists, poets bent over in an ocean of chalky words painted in child style.

Authors of brilliant color, brilliant meaning.

Wisdom written, published immediately on rocky tablet, all Old Testament.

Simple, plain, proclamations from child heart, child truth.

Lips bitten, knuckles white, pressing hard, bracing wind and the elements.

For Art’s sake.

Because the Words need a voice and a place.

Because their hearts have a story to tell.

You zig and zag around theirs as you do yours, the stories.

Take care not to step on these yellow lines with pink prose and hard written lines on rough gritty.

Like ours, theirs want to spring out into April air and be told, to dodge the rain drops and lay there sundrenched long enough to be heard.

Find Joy in the sunlight, find Joy in the telling.

Sidewalk artists for the day, delight in the hope of eyes seeing creativity at their feet.

Careful to step big and step over the masterpiece after naming it “very good”.

Where is childlike wonder in your words?

How did childlike wonder go all black and white, shackled up and bound inside the lines.

When did the palete lose its chalky choices once full of pastel poetry and prose?

When did the mundane monochromatic get to be enough. When did we settle for the uninspiring. Stop looking for the beautiful.

Sidewalk poetry inspires. Calls to come write and play and tell a bumpy concete story.

Color it joyful, color it bright, color it sideways.

Color your story on the hard path, knelling and bent down with your dusty fingers and your windblown mane.

Lay down your story all gritty and real with your colored chalk. Write it bigger than big cause you’re all outdoors and free to be big sideways and be loud big.

Write like the child you are, the child of God.

Tell it poetic, tell it all chalky and dusty, all kneeled down child’s pose.

And let the sidewalk lower school poets inspire you to freely write it down, lay it down, smack down at the entrance and exit of the middle of the everything.

Let Joy in the Art blow words of sweet beauty, sweet blessing.

And let the sweet and the simple be Art for today.

Art that inspires all the growing-up people.

Words that halt the hearts, and the steps, and the pace of the too fast people.

Words that say stop, there’s a story that wants to be heard on the concrete path on the right in front of your big growing-up feet.

Stop and read and be inspired, before the rain washes them all away.