yonder

Sometimes you get to choose the broken you enter into with someone and sometimes you are pushed right through the door of suffering with no warning.  

Sometimes that brokenness slams through the world and seems to define everything and everyone in reach.  It dictates relationship and thought and plans and feeling.  The sorrow and pain hounds and whines and pulls in every direction.   Ones you love choose destruction and dysfunction, and helpless, you stand by and yearn for restoration and for undoing. "What-ifs" storm frantic and trust is far off.  Healing seems an impossibility.  The cymbals of sadness crash loud through your heart and your mind.

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Peace.  Be still.  

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There is hope and joy in the mourning.  We turn quickly from a season of Thanks-giving to a season marked by longing.  Christmas is a celebration of His coming- yes yes hallelujah! - but the more we see of the brokenness, the more it becomes a plea for His Advent: His Advent in our souls daily, His Advent in the laboring weary hearts all around us, and His Advent of full healing in this limping lonely world.  We continue our thanksgiving while also calling hungrily for more, more, more of His grace, mercy, and peace for our hearts, our families, our communities. 

There is hope and joy in the morning.  Circumstances may rock and jar but the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His faithfulness has no end.  His love never fails.  The ones with whom you swim muddled together through the murky sea of despair and anxiety are often the ones who become most dear because the relationship has no off-limits, no holding back.  You truly know each other and love each other.  There is no question of whether this will pass, if He is your Father; this WILL pass. The question is only "when?"  "How long, Oh Lord?" 

May I shockingly pray that the beginning of this Advent season stretches us both to see and embrace the broken as Jesus embraces us?  Where brokenness abides, there also is beauty much treasured.

~~A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.  Fall on your knees~~