Storm. Write. Dance.

Maybe you've heard the saying, "We are not here to wait for the storm to pass but to learn to dance in the rain."

I wrestle with why. Why do I love the rain? Why have my eyes been quick to fill with tears lately? As I sat in stillness yesterday to re-realize me in this new season, there is a fresh sweetness and realizing of gifts. One fairly huge one - the gift to me that is writing continues to have an uncanny call to the center of me. This past February I considered taking a sabbatical to write. I didn't. What keeps me from the written word is less important as what draws me to it, what is awakened in me when I write. The Eric Liddell aha, feeling the pleasure of God in the practice of it, a nearness to Him as His heart and my heart find themselves in word. Reservations about my writing being unoriginal, irrelevant, unnecessary ... well, again, in that stillness yesterday, the truth is that it's less about me and less about you and more about Him.

My journaling journey began in middle school, waxing and waning to the present. Not a big fan of writing scholastic papers through the years, not caring for someone else to tell me what/how/when to write. More of an outflow than a calculated process of input/output. More of a gift than a requirement.

I began writing this blog when we became intimately acquainted with melanoma and the havoc it reeks on bodies, specifically mine, then the introduction to chemo and the havoc it reeks on one's mind, will, and emotion. We were tentatively stepping into a storm, its final resolution wildly unknown. So I wrote. I looked death in the eye. I wrestled with lies. I danced. I wrote. It was a piece of keeping me sane and you informed.

And so I write again. I dance on. Not from a storm of darkness but a different weather pattern. The past nearly 3 years God has been teaching me how to dance with children, with families, with single parents, with grandparents, with volunteers, through the death of loved ones, through the death of marriages, in the dance of directing children's ministry. Many new steps, some familiar, following His lead to receive and let His love pour out of me for each of them in turn. Allowing God to take my hands, just as I am, in a position to lead, I held tightly to Him. The dance wasn't about me or about them but about Him.

The dance is being refocused as I am no longer directing, now following His lead to be. Less doing, more being. Less talking, more listening. Less picking up, more laying down. Less planning, more supporting. Same praying. Somewhat different dancers on the dance floor around me. But that's for another write.

Wonderings - autumn leaves finding their brilliance under an overcast sky. Grass finding its brightest green in the electric atmosphere of a lightning storm. Hm.