Do you know how to make sure your baby gets a full feeding?
Put a cold wet washcloth on his back. Seems cruel right? But it wakes him up so
that he can eat all he wants and then he’ll sleep soundly. Most kids are
half-hearted, sleepy eaters. But I understand that regular full feedings are
one of the best ways to establish a normal schedule for your baby. Do you think
I find a spiritual metaphor in that? You bet.
Today I’m grieving irreparable relationships. I’ve lost my
share of friends over the years due to my immaturity, sustained conflict, or
situations beyond anyone’s control. Conversation doesn’t typically help because
at least one party has lost the strength and motivation to continue a painful
relationship. God has been teaching me that these broken friendships will
continue to prick at my heart for years and years and that’s okay.
It’s unbelievably uncomfortable for me to accept the idea
that I can’t FIX people’s opinions of me or singlehandedly set the terms of my
relationship with them. I’ve tried to hash things out so many times, believing
that if people just understood my heart, they’d like me. Problem is, sometimes
my heart comes up lacking. Other times, these people just don’t give a
damn. Typically, I can’t really
blame them.
I feel like God said to me today, “I gave you relationships
you can’t fix,” as though that were some kind of Christmas present. I felt like
He was asking me to let myself feel the loss of relationship AND the loss of
personal control over other people. It an amazingly humbling process. And not
to over-spiritualize it, but I do feel like it forces me into a desperate place
of needing the nourishment that only Father can give. It wakes me up from my
sleepy delusions of self-sufficiency. It draws me close to my emotional and
spiritual food source. It reminds me to eat.
I wrote a song about this combined with what I was reading
in Mark 4. I recorded it and posted it to bandcamp. It’s totally worth a listen
if ONLY for the ending where Annabel interrupts and starts talking to me about
the baby. You can listen to it for free at…
If you’re interested in the lyrics, here they are!
You’re hand is like a wet
Cold cloth on my warm bare back
And I start awake
Latching on, drawing life from your breast from your veins
You said if seed falls to the ground
And dies it comes around to life
And spreads a thousand seeds to find
The fertile soil, the tilled and toiled
You said a lamp should never hide
The light in camps of darkness where
The blind have stumbled on for ages
Tearing pages from their minds
And if the smallest seed could sleep
In richest beds and start to root
With mighty branches reaching up
It makes a shady place to rest
And oh…
I will be whole
I will be home
I’ll be with the Lord
And be forgiven
Hey, just now found your blog. Very profound stuff. This post particularly hit me because I spend a lot of time thinking about my relationships with others, and I find it hard to cut off relationships that may need to be cut off. So I resonate with you on this. It's a thing that requires complete trust in God and yet is very scary at the same time.
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