No Eggs, No New Dress, No Bunnies....Just GRACE

 

Jesus said to his disciples - -
"Let's go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest awhile"
Mark 6:31

I am writing this from a quiet place today.....a place in the center of Alabama called Verbena...you know, like the flower.....and its quiet.....except the running water of Blue Creek nearby...the very creek my Grandmother and Grandfather owned and panned for gold in when I was a kid.   I hear the leaves crunching from a nearby deer.....and I am alone here with the memories of my childhood....this place I hated desperately as a child.

Hated it because I was a city girl stuck in a place of outhouses, grasshoppers, dirt and QUIET.  I liked the noise of the city.  The noise kept me from thinking about my lack of self-confidence, insecurities and fears.

But standing here now....almost fifty years later, in that very same spot of quiet, somehow its all different...yet the same.  Now the quiet soothes me....I don't mind remembering those insecurities and fears as I can look back on the road I've traveled and see clearly why God chose that road for me to walk down.  How those very same insecurities became the tool that helped me grow and led me straight to Him.

And I see off in the distance my brother and my sister.....the ones who threw crickets on me and made me cry....who I now love with a love that only someone who has walked a long dirty road together can love.....and somehow this place that I hated becomes a wonderful memory.

I loved that one of the last things Jesus wanted to do with his disciples was to "Go off by ourselves to a quiet place..." cause isn't that what true friends do?

As we walk the woods, Uncle Kenny talks about how the tops of the trees are called the "crown" and reminds us that the pine trees die if they can't reach the sun......yes....THAT Son....they die.  They have to be thinned out....to allow ROOM for the Son to reach their entire soul....the core of their being.

They DIE without the SON. 

And its not until we "Go off by ourselves with God to a quiet place" that we feel the Son beaming down into our cores....and adding nourishment that can only come from the Son.  By uncluttering our lives of stuff.....by thinning out our lives of things that don't include or matter to God....we are leaving room for the Son to heal us....to grow us....to strengthen us.