Ask for a Sign

The other day, I felt a message coming in. I don’t know how to describe the feeling, other than a warmth and an invitation from somewhere inside of me. Perhaps that place is my Heart’s Cave, a place inside of me where I meet with my Soul, and slip into the Ocean of Possibilities, the Ocean of Creation. Jesus meets me there. We often sit by a bonfire on the shore, just hanging out.

On this particular day, I had been thinking about Isaiah 7, where God, through Isaiah, tells King Ahaz of Jerusalem to ask for a sign. Ahaz refuses. After all, the Ten Commandments said that he should not “test the Lord“. But God wanted to give Ahaz a sign, proof of Presence, to comfort and encourage him. If you’d like more info on that, listen to my Dec. 22/19 sermon; here’s the YouTube link.

I was needing encouragement and comfort too. There had been a couple of deaths in my family. Plus, I’m still, on some level, recovering from August’s surgery. It was a busy week. I was tired.

So when I felt the nudge to look for a sign, first I turned to my little For Today devotional. The Dec. 17 reading said, “We were not now nor ever could be like normal eaters. that was the beginning of freedom.” When I’m tired or sad, I want to eat. But I’d already eaten a very good breakfast. I wasn’t hungry. Something shifts when we finally accept that we are not normal eaters. It is a new beginning. No need to fight what is. To be, in this new normal, is freedom.

Next, I opened to Dec. 17 in Celtic Daily Prayer (Aidan readings). It told me a story about a vase that survived a fire. Before the fire, peple said, “What a pretty vase.” After the fire, they said, “What pretty flowers!” It’s not about me, the vase. It’s about what my life contains, and how I draw attention to God’s creation. Here I am at 62. My body still works perfectly well, but it isn’t as lovely as it once was. Still, it holds and highlights a beauty beyond my own. It has been through the fire of “life”. I need to accept my new normal, and love it, even if it means getting tired more easily than I used to.

Finally I drew a card from The Heart of Faerie Oracle. Queen of the Night. The Queen of the Night embodies longing, and I had been feeling the longing to write again, to blog, to say things that don’t fit into a sermon or a learning disability assessment report. Don’t ignore that longing, the Queen of Night was saying. Go ahead and write. It may not be good writing, or well received, but follow the longing and just do it.

The Queen of the Night also says to draw another card, to make sense of where the longing is taking me. I drew the Queen of Shadows. Writing here, writing what I need to write at this point in my life, means I can’t just look at the sunny side. There are neglected parts of me that need dusted off and brought into the light.

And so, here I am, blogging once again, taking the risk, committing. What was old is new again.