Growth is circular

The past few days have been trailing a little to be honest.  It feels like four seasons in one day, covering so much leaving this sense today as I reflected back with Sister, that going around in circles is a normal occurrence.  Going circular in cycles, in seasons, leaving a sense of living life of rhythms. Days easing its burden into the cool dark of the night, sun slipping lazily into the sky; while darkness gives way to the dawn breaking and rising hope of the new mornings. 

Often we use time as a measurement, to compare, see growth, development yet I have come to the conclusion that our growth, inner growth is never to be measured linear, rather starting to feel its circular. 

It tends to bend back on itself and overlaps in a loop with swirls and curves. There is no matching forward on a timeline so much as adding rings to our core like aged oak, firming the roots, breaking bark raw like shedding skins, limbs reaching and stretching, yearning for light. 

There are droughts and rings like slivers, scratching out our captivity like hash marks on a prisoner’s wall. There are monsoons when we soak up the earth and we drink so deeply and everything expands. 

Sometimes it feels like you are dancing in puddles in your wellingtons witnessing a bit of a miracle in the aftermath when the storm clouds tuck themselves back into the bright blue skies, because your still standing. The sun always comes shining back out. Ordinary days roll on by with a few of those days that make you doubt growth. After all the world expects fast growth forward, march down a timeline, do more, be more, have more…. 

In this culture of upgrades, always moving forward, moving upwards! Its a refreshing reminder that the Lord is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion! There is a sense that the Lords Kingdom lives in ever widening ring, the core and the hollows. Lords Kingdom growth mostly happens on ordinary days - so I get the sense Im been taught… miracles in everyday actions… 

My true self is showing up, those rings are expanding, everything is tender with new growth. 

The most vulnerable place to be is with your true self. The most powerful place to reclaim the Kingdom of the Lord at work in your life and all around you is when your true self shows up. 

On a few moments during the past few days, I have felt the limits to how often I want to show up at the table with no place to sit and nothing to offer. There are days when Im tired, feeling no one understands or I fear my own thoughts leading me to a space of the opposite to reality. Through this though, I see tenderness and compassionate, kindness around and it breaks me open with this taste of learned mercy by loving me. There I set my eyes back onto the cross, where the weight feels familiar while uplifting at the same instance. I have to be gifted grace through seeing my ‘weakness’ again. Learning the Lord does not despise a needy one, and the gospel invites the poor to the table in nothing by rags. Its just so happens some of us just clean up better, but we all come starving and empty to grace.