Sometimes it takes hours for me to get to a place where I am at a place I am willing to write... but I walk that journey because I know in the walk.. each time... I am more after.... So I swallow hard and I pace and then I sit... sometimes I try to get back to sleep and pretend that I don't see and that I don't hear and that I don't know what to write... but the words are there... they are there...
Life... death... choices.... sometimes ours ... sometimes not....
So many things that we truly aren't in control of.... so then what I am in control of... what can I choose.....
Well, I can choose... life or death... I choose love or hate... I choose forgiveness and the foolish aspects of my truest home.. my heavenly home... My Father's Kingdom... or I can choose to be wise in my own eyes.. and you see when I put it like that why would I choose the ways of this world over the ways of my Father.... and He sits with me and I lean into Him and we walk....
Tonight... tonight once again I saw battlefields... which I think is weirdly funny because I always think after I see one and I walk through it and emerge that there won't be another one... isn't that some what naive on my part... maybe it is... maybe it just shows that the battlefields haven't won over my heart... and that I am still willing to emerge with hope intact... still willing to emerge from them with faith.. wiser maybe... more solemn sometimes... quieter sometimes.... but emerge from them always with the grace and love of my Father I will...
Battlefields... ever think about those vacations where they tell you to come visit the battlefields of old.. see where this civil war battle occurred or one from the revolutionary war... see where victories were won... or lost (depends on how you look at it) come see the ground that was once so blood stained... where men died... men who were sons.. fathers... brothers... friends... don't you think that is weird.... history.... for the sake of history.....
Certain buildings are like that for me... different places.... different times... different faces... different names.... but pictures of portraits and places sometimes dance upon my mind and my heart like those battlefields...
I have friends who don't believe in God right now... who wouldn't step foot into a worship service if their life depended on it.... People I know got divorced... people I know well they died... literally or inside..... they died.... and I don't think you just walk away from things like that unchanged....
Not ever unchanged....
Tonight I had a picture of a dear friend and she and I walked onto a battlefield from sides that were opposite of one another ... and we met in the middle and just looked at one another... eyes full of knowledge I don't think we were ever intended to bare... hearts full of stories and weight that we weren't ever really meant to have.... and there was blood... and there were wounds... and we sat on the ground knees to our chests and held one another and the rains came.... and we sat there.. allowing them to soak us... allowing them to bring their healing properties... we sat there in that place and grew strong again... learned to hope again... learned to walk again......
So I see battlefields.. and at times my breath is taken away and I feel like I was punched in the stomach and so I pray.... I pray and I rest in the arms of the most capable One I know ...... I sit and I ask for Him to make my heart more like His...
I pray Jabez's prayer... but not so that I can be abundantly blessed as the culture ripped into years ago but so that I won't do harm..... because I have felt the angels remove the bullets from my back that had been lodged there and I don't want to be the one that would ever place them there in another....
The battlefields... why their hold comes and goes... I welcome the residue... it stays upon my mind and my heart.... and I think it makes me more the person I truly want to be... I think it teaches me well... that love is always patient and always kind and that it covers... and that I won't seek my own way.... or my own whatever....
It almost won... it almost won with my heart... those fields almost took my heart into a world so hard and cynical and sarcastic .... but a good friend wrote this article about in boiling water you can become a carrot or an egg.... and that began the road back for me.... a carrot become mush and an egg become hard.... and the battlefields and the enemies and those that shoot didn't win... instead they became the soil for which love could grow even stronger....
Here's to being a mush.....................................
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