Thoughts While Painting the Porch Window

Well it seems the monsoons are taking a break and we are finally having some really awesome Fall weather. Blue skies, sunshine, great temps....it's so gorgeous.  And we are taking advantage of every minute we are not at work to get those outside chores we neglected all summer done.  Garage roofed and painted...check.  Front porch walls inside and outside trim painted...check.  Outside basement door replaced, garden put to bed....well it's not ALL done...but there is a plan!  And there is an "inside list" in process too for the days ahead when the weather won't let us be outside anymore.  It ALL has to get done.  No more procrastinating.  We have a goal to get this place painted, cleaned, purged and pruned of unnecessary objects and we will get there.

I think a lot while I paint.  I was thinking yesterday about discernment.  About that whole lovely, messy complicated process of sorting out whose will is whose in my life.  About how I get MY internal voices (especially those anxious ones) to pipe down long enough to hear the Still Small One.  About risk and trust.  About letting go and letting myself be led....and how hard that really is for me....and how I really do believe in my heart of hearts that if I just get it figured out well enough, have enough control of all the bits and parts and pieces, leave no small thing to chance....that somehow that will be the thing that will make it all right....whatever that might mean!

Eight years ago I left my nice secure life, my house of eighteen years, my church and my friends, my town and all that was familiar to go off, all alone across the state to do something new.  It worked out pretty fine.  From it I ended up with a new good job, a home, a very lovely husband, great friends, not only a church...but a congregation in which I share leadership as a priest and my student loans paid off.  I also have a whole new sense of myself as a person as a result of the life events that happened during these eight years...events that I know would not have transpired had I stayed put, stayed home, stayed....safe.  I knew when I made the journey into the unknown back then that God was calling me out into it....I could not have said into what or for what purpose, but I knew for certain that it was about something bigger than me.

That call came out of something practical.... the need to find a way to pay back student loans. God, I believe, uses the circumstances of our lives as well as the promptings of our hearts as ways to move us towards the places we are called. So discernment.  What is the next call, the next adventure?  Where do our hearts draw us or our life circumstances take us?  Because this adventure will be an "us" adventure.  This story will not be first person singular, but will be in two parts.  Two minds discerning...better than one?  Two hearts attending to where the Spirit might be leading. Someone who helps me calm and quiet myself to hear that small Voice.

So the porch is looking good.  And at some point...there will be answers.