I reread the article “Five reasons to stay in church” by Aiden Enns, Publisher of Geez Magazine, this morning, as well as this comment from ‘angela’:

“This is a re-occuring event in my life: I am sitting in church, in my pew in the balcony, and someone is talking down below at the pulpit, and I start to twitch. I shift. I look out the window, out the door. I drink my coffee and stare at my hands, and I tell myself: Self, don’t leave. You will miss out.

And it’s true. Some days, I swear I need to mount those stairs to the pew in the balcony with a sack of nails and a hammer and pound my shoes to the floor because (lord almighty) I can hardly breathe from what’s being said, and then other days I sit, I drink my coffee, and god siddles up alongside me and smashes my heart to smithereens with all that beauty he’s got pouring out of that stained glass window, that preacher’s mouth, that 200 year old song we just sang, that grandpa that camps out at church to keep the furnace going in the winter, those flaws, flaws, flaws. 

I love my church. It disapoints me, hurts my heart, leads me astray. And it elevates me, heals me, and shines God’s face on me.

It ain’t heaven yet, baby. That’s not the point.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Exciting as the prospect of being a mother is to me, I find hours of kids’ television programming utterly terrifying. Barney. Mickey. Icky!!

Thanks to Fiest, I maintain a modicum of hope:

Seawall, December 20, 2008 (my last walk before heading east)

The last three years have been spiritually abysmal. You may not have seen it, or maybe it was plain as day, either way I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. 

The devastated dreams of a career within the CBC coupled by my mom’s year-long graze with death by cancer spun this once confident faithful into a pit of despair. It came slowly. Unknowingly. I’ve been crawling through a long season of why-asking while my Lord’s voice, once my closest confidante, has lay dormant.

Nearly a year ago I began seeing a counselor — a lifeline in what had come to be an emotionally and spiritually void existence. I got married amidst that void and by God’s grace Michael’s and my love has grown, slowly, in spite of it.

It has, and continues to be a slow journey - a pilgrimage to wholeness. The wholeness of being. Of being daughter fully known and loved by parents fractured by painful childhoods and eventual divorce. It has been a journey restoring trust in a God I had seen as the divider and stealer of relationship, friendship and love — my ever-present scapegoat. It has been a journey to let go, to unhinge the steel doors around my heart, to name the wounds, to name the wounders and choose forgiveness, healing, hope.

Hope is my word for this year. Hope. She is a new friend. She is filled with longing and beauty. She is searcher, wonderer, and wanderer. She seeks good, and expects it. I love my new friend. I’d love for you to meet. Perhaps you know her, if so you should introduce her to a friend. 

This journey has been filled with hundreds of little breakthroughs, dozens of wrenching sobs and a handful of glimmering pictures of what is to be, what our Father intends for you, for me…

My prayer for you is that 2009 is a beginning.