Delight



Maybe it’s the frigid January temperatures.  The wind cutting through my cheeks.  Shoulders lifted higher.  Tense.  Abdominal muscles tight.  The air freezing at my nostrils.  Air, when inhaled, pierces my throat.  Causing me to flounder and flop like a fish out of water, begging for a life line. Asking to be free in the waters where it once felt so comfortable.

Maybe it’s the residual effects of debts from Christmas.

Maybe it’s the turning of a new year, and unscaled mountains left to climb.

Maybe it’s age, and with it,  heartaches.  New challenges.  More people to please.  Relationships to balance.  Children to birth.  Elderly to care for.  Sicknesses to heal. Others to bury.

Maybe it’s just coincidence.

But, lately, it feels like everyone’s in pain.

Sometimes I have those days.  Where it feels like the mud and the mire of this world is being heaped on my shoulders.  My own stuff.  The stuff of others whom I love.  The stuff of this world that is outside my doors, but very much inside my heart. The burdens I want to share. The loads I want to shoulder. But in this attempt at shouldering, I'm reminded of my limitations to fix it all, if anything.

I sometimes wonder on days like these, how God can take it all.  How it must pain him.  To watch his children struggle and grasp and fall apart.  How his heart must rip in two.  How he must fall to his knees in anguish and sorrow of a world that feels forgotten.  Of a world that is trying its very best to go its own way.  With the best of intentions. With our fragile human hearts.

But lately, especially lately, He reminds me that He is bigger than all of it.  That He is waiting to lighten our loads. To carry it. To carry you.  Because, he delights:

Yes, delights in you.

Because He tells us that he knows our ways before we move forward.  That he orchestrates the very beat of our heart.  That even in the sludge and the pond scum, he finds exquisite beauty.  In you. In me.  That he whispers and calls you to bring it out and shine for Him. In the ugly places.  In your ugly places.  Because His character is all about bringing you back. And He promises to help you get there.

As we stand on our mountains, and sometimes sink in our pits,  He always calls us forward, upward, back to Him, back to beauty. Wooing.  Pursuing.  Shepherding.  His weary travelers.  And amidst the earthquakes and your earthly “quakes” He, in His perfect, gentle, still small voice reminds you, daily,

“Child, I delight in you”.  He will not let you go; you are not alone in it.

He delights in every detail of their lives

~Psalm 37: 23