Still waiting.
Our property manager and her family are back in their house, which was untouched. She said it was merely a matter of wind direction. If it had blown another way, their house would be gone.
Hopefully next week we'll start up the great document hunt and even more hopefully, maybe we'll be finished with all that by the end of this month.
If I were to look back and wonder what my life was like these days, it would be like living in slow motion with grainy texture and too much light.
It's the feeling of being always on the edge of something that must be done, and then realizing that there is nothing one can do. It's waking up to that every morning.
I get so I almost flinch, and then run down the list in my mind- this is waiting on that, that is waiting on this, and today- today is a great empty space.
I feel like one of those stones caught in the surf with that lovely, rough clattering and hissing of waves.
It's not that I'm actually doing nothing; I manage all my domestic duties as imperfectly as I ever did, and visitors are often coming and we are sometimes going out.
It's just that my internal landscape is wide open, and pounded by waves. I can't help but think that this sort of pounding is on purpose, divine purpose. It's not to punish, but to deepen.
It's as though my understanding of God grows through these experiences- I understand Him to be greater than I had thought before. I see this best in the quiet, long stretches of waiting, the times when I am suspended in my own life.
Richard Rohr wrote that suffering can be defined as any time we are not in control. The more I consider that, the more true it becomes to me.
It makes me think of this phrase: Desist, and know that I (am) God, which is how Young's Literal Translation puts that verse in the 46th Psalm.
Desist is to cease doing something.
When I am suspended, when I must stop, that is when my understanding opens up to Him in a way which is beyond sensation or experience or even head knowledge.
I simply know that He is fully present and fully in control and full of His mysterious and good purposes, and that whole picture is absolutely beyond my grasp.
