While looking for something else I realized what’s not quite right in the sewing room. While pulling blocks that I need to piece and bring with me to quilt on this trip I realized I don’t have a cutting table where I can keep the mat and cutter. I have a ginormous pressing surface that I love and utilize well but it is too high for me to cut on. It’ll be a little while before I can make something happen.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself getting a little sad as I had what I thought was two weeks left “The Ignatian Adventure,” and then I learned that there are thirty-two weeks! So this will go to the end of June. Squeee!!!
As I started prayer this morning part of the intention is to live at Jesus feet. This is before reading Matthew 28: 1-10, where Mary Magdalene and the other Mary head over for the tomb. As they head back to tell the disciples what the Angel said to them they meet Jesus, touch His feet, and worship him. Earlier in Scripture Mary of Bethany sits at Jesus feet. And then there’s the woman who washes His feet with her tears and anoints His feet with costly oil, anointing Jesus for His death. Jesus washes the disciples feet, placing Himself at their service.
Then Moses taking his sandals off on the Holy Ground where God speaks to him.
I sip books, drinking from the well of this and that one as either time permits or as I experience promptings in that 30 to 40 minutes before Mass. The last few days have been with Leticia sipping, or taking shots of whiskey or Our Lady of Hot Messes , either way you go. While I was trying to avoid one thing I turned to reading this, ending up digging deeper into the thing I was trying to avoid. Oof.
There is a distinct difference between navel gazing and examining life. Navel gazing has me hunched over looking at my life with something of an, “oh woe is me, this is terrible, I can’t believe this happened to me because I’m a ‘good person'” kind of thing. Examining my life/conscience sees the ick, acknowledges it, brings it to Confession, and then works on either that place of sin or habit formed from sin/shame. It also acknowledges the good, where God is moving in my life and how I am responding to God’s Love. Very Big Difference Here. Both are necessary.
Sipping sometimes leads to deeper drinking, not in a getting drunk kind of way, but in a refreshing kind of way, leading to the, “Oh here’s what I am in need of seeing,” kind of way. Sometime after Rich Mullins died Twenty the Countdown Magazine put together sound clips from interviews with him over the years. One stands out
Friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is part of our experience, and if we are looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we are only going to frustrate the friendship. Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things, and loneliness lived together in the same experience.
Rich Mullins
it is that loneliness being part of our existence that has stayed with me for a long time. I think I’ve come to understand that this loneliness is the place of longing for, yearning for God. We seek, I seek fulfillment of this loneliness, I learned and developed bad/poor habits of filling this bottomless well with things other than God. Sometimes this comes in the habit of stress eating, sometimes this comes in the form of inertia, sometimes this comes in the form of needing and seeking other people to fill this place. There is only One who can fill this place. One who is filling this place, One who will fill this place. This infilling happens when I’m open to it. This morning (as usual this post is taking several days to write) in Acts 2 in the Spiritual Exercises there is something dynamic that happens, and in some ways I’ve witnessed it in my own life. And not simply through a Life in the Spirit Seminar, though that started me listening differently. Come Holy Spirit! Let the fire fall.
Understanding, remembering, recognizing, that loneliness is part of our, part of my existence then talking about it with my Sweetie is making this trip a lot easier. This is a long story for another time.
I do hope to write from the road. In the meantime, how is the Spirit leading you?
God bless,
Teri
A Quilter's Heart 