When someone else writes what you wanted to but didn’t know how.

The little boat
had seen many days at sea.
There was still colour in her paint but her clip had slowed visibly.
The freshness, the eagerness, the vitality had waned.
These days it felt difficult to be a boat –
not natural but laborious.
Things that previously brought joy & life
seemed to painfully elude her.

She needs this harbour time.
Time to dock.
Time to bob in one place & see the same quiet things for a while.
Time to be attended to & not to attend.
A time of harbour rest, of safeness & sameness,
of warming sun, of staring at gulls,
of smelling salty air,
of taking in the gentle clanging & bobbing of other boats,
the occasional sound of a motor, the lines clinking against the masts.

The harbour is where I want to sit.
It’s where I need to sit after an especially busy, intense season.
My soul yearns for a harbour experience of calming sights, smells & sounds.
All my senses need to feel her healing balm.
And all of me needs to know that:
Stillness is progress,
Quiet is impetus,
Solitude is movement.
Soul care is breakthrough.

One day soon I will look past the harbour onto the horizon.
First I will just notice it.
As time passes, I will appreciate anew its grandeur, its vision, its call.
And eventually I will yearn again to travel there on open seas.
For now, Harbour Time is where I renew those soulful yearnings.

“Others went out on the sea in ships…
They saw the works of the Lord,
his wonderful deeds in the deep…
and he guided them to their desired haven.”

Psalm 107:23, 24, 30

 

Thanks, ‘A life of interest’

 

Goodbye Death

Its hard to say definitively that I’ve said more goodbyes than your average 30 year old, but I suspect I may at least be above average in these stakes.

The more I say it, the more it feels like death, even if I know it is not a forever-farewell.  Maybe it is the very fact that I’ve turned 30 that makes this process harder?  Something to do with my biological clock perhaps???  Or maybe just that, as a spring reaches the point of no return, I’ve said so many in such a short space of time that I’m fast approaching the “I’m-done-with-this-can’t-do-it-anymore” point.

Whatever it is, it sucks.

And yet…

The pain of goodbyes and changes is in direct correlation with the joy of love.  It hurts only because we love.  Okay, so I’m sure that it is not always purely altruistic – I might cry when you leave because I’m lonely and don’t want to be – but a large part of it is because of love and our pain serves to help us see and appreciate that we love and are loved.

If we allow ourselves to ignore the pain of goodbye, we are in denial of love.  If we focus only on the pain of goodbye, we miss the joy of love.  To engage fully with the relationship between love and the pain of farewells, is to celebrate the power of resurrection life.  Jesus did not merely ‘come back from the dead’, he passed through death, he went beyond it and broke its power over us.

We need no longer fear.

Good news

When all is said and done,

We spoiled it,

But He made it all okay again.