How to Keep from Sounding Hollow?
June 09 ,2009
Nathan, Dani, and I were just enjoying those sacred moments when the children are tucked in bed at last... Perhaps the most exhausted yet peaceful moments of the day. With the exception of Kate getting up to tell us something was on the wall, and Wesley pulling down the window shade in the bedroom with shouts of glee, all was peaceful. :) We started talking about something I’ve been reflecting on today.
How to do you keep from sounding hollow? It feels like right now I am saying a lot of words. A lot of phrases that started as fresh are starting to sound like something I am saying too often. How many times have I told someone, “I know that God is just as good now that I have cancer as He was before.”
When I say, “I have always trusted God with my life, and in that way, nothing has changed.” I am trying to state to them the condition of my spirit. But to myself I am starting to sound a little like a broken record. At what point do words become living?
It seems that there is a comfort to those around me in seeing and knowing that I am okay. Twice in the last two days I’ve been told, “I just needed to see you, to see if you really are okay.” I guess the fact that I’m still smiling and laughing and enjoying life is important. Is that what it means to live out trust in a hard place? But it takes no effort! It’s just genuinely being how I feel... covered in the cloak of a knowing God... like when you’re a little girl and you put on Daddy’s coat and it is so big it just swallows you in coziness. Mostly, my heart is there.
So today I wondered how I can keep my words from really being hollow and redundant. How do you live the words that you really mean? It makes me wonder what is ahead. I guess I want to be a person who says less and lives more. I don’t want to speak what is false, to build a castle out of statements that can be easily laid seige by my enemy.
When I was just a Mommy of toddlers, I had little visions of what it meant when I said that my deepest desire is that my life would show the bigness and glory of God. Now I’m in a new place, and I say it, but I surely can’t picture it. So I guess I’ll just keep speaking, and trust for the grace to live it along the way.