Made for peace
Our home is a quiet one tonight. The baby (her words, not mine) of our family has gone home to New York for a week, the mature one has gone to bed (or to study for grad-school), the world-traveler is sleeping on the couch in front of me, and I am sitting here, in our collective favorite chair. The silver spoon turned wind-chimes sound outside and the heater hums intermittently.
I was born for quiet nights.
A year ago at this time I was still working from home, making tangible, touchable art every day, creeping by on pennies and coffee, and loving life more than ever before. Peace was everywhere I looked and I felt alive, so alive. I was born for peace.
I know this about myself.
And yet.
I let the commitments, the pro-bono work, the meetings, the small-groups, the good-bye parties and welcome home greetings, I let them crowd in until I am suffocating under the weight of a blocked out calendar. Three weeks ago I suffocated. I went down, down hard.
Unless you're the Baby, the Mature, or the World-traveler, you might not know that because I kept a smiling can-do face on until Saturday night. But Saturday night I came home and crashed hard.
A combination of leftover pneumonia and a sinus infection are good excuses as anything to lay low for four days, and so I take them. I tell myself, "After Christmas, you will get things in order. You will sit down. You will think about life. You will think about what went wrong this fall. You will ask for grace. And you will walk in the Spirit." And perhaps that's true. Maybe that will happen after Christmas.
But tonight I'm grateful for a quiet house. For peace.
I am no stranger to asking God why He made me the way He did. Why this gift? Why this talent? Why this personality? Why this prone? Why? I ask it of Him more than any question perhaps. And it's mostly because I'm so desperate to be faithful with what he's given me. I want to be faithful with that measure of faith. But why does He pile on the responsibility, the weight of knowledge and the drive to do more than I'm capable of in the end?
Why has He borne me for quiet nights and peace, if my life is most faithfully used in the middle of chaos and need?
I don't have an answer to that tonight.
I'm thinking a lot about Mary and why God chooses us on the merit of the miracle, but also gives us responsibilities that look less miraculous and just mundane.
That's all, friends. That's all.
