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Love will come deliver this weak world
Just before another sparrow falls
The dawn will swell, a new light our eyes have never seen
Our very hope made sight
The day when Love makes all things right
These words surfaced in my subconscious one day as I muddled through the mundane. Sometimes God will cut through the low humming noise of life. Sometimes He will pierce past the wall of emails and life’s endless preparations to remind us we are spiritual beings on a spiritual trajectory. If we’re paying attention we will notice His kingdom come in quiet reflection, cumulus clouds, the kindness of strangers…the Robin’s morning song. And often, when the Holy Spirit speaks, these divine and spontaneous interruptions will echo off the walls of our hearts as thoughts -- thoughts that will always follow the current of God’s love and truth.
So often, when people approach me as a Spiritual Director, the internal stirrings revolve around discernment and one of the most clarifying questions we can ask in the face of a penetrating thought or a specific imparted word is this: “does this thought or word lead me to greater faith, hope, and love?” A brief reflection on this discernment question and I concluded that the words imparted that day were indeed from God. They reflected the Bible’s eschatological narrative along with His relational heart as described in scripture.
But the Spirit’s words to me in that moment traveled far beyond theological soundness or cerebral processing and into the inner sanctum of my soul -- into the holy of holies of who I was becoming.I instinctively knew God was extending a deeply personal invitation in real time. In the spirit of the Psalms God drew a poet’s pen to usher me into an eternal sobriety check in the midst of the temporal tension I was beginning to feel in my early thirties.
As I entered my third decade of life I began to sense a war between vocational ambition and motherhood. Yet, amid words and rhyme, I heard the sound of a deeper invitation…a call louder than cultural achievement, more lasting than temporary circumstantial breakthrough and more grounding to my soul than upward mobility.
God's voice had come to set my heart, like a compass, towards a light that would never be extinguished, on a name that would never fade, and in a peace that could not be manufactured apart from Him.
Somewhere deep in the center of my soul the Holy Spirit was planting an eternal deposit, a seed of truth God would intend to nurture and grow in me, from everyday to eternity. Ultimately, the shalom our souls long for cannot be found through the doorway of achievement, strategy or systems of control. There was something better.
There was and is someONE far better: God Himself. He didn’t want me to squander my life settling for anything or anyone less.
He wanted to save me from failed attempts to forcefully and methodically arrange my way into my own version of shalom restored, my own version of perfection...my own carefully curated stepping stones back to Eden's garden.
God offers good news for us in the here and now. Good news for an anxious generation caught between the corners of algorithms, skyscrapers, and bottom lines. His love is here. His Presence is available and He is coming back to deliver us from the weakness of the world as we now know it. He will usher in a new dawn, a light the likes of which we have never seen: His kingdom will come on earth as it is in Heaven. All things will be set right once and for all.
May we partner with Him in the purity of these indomitable truths towards greater faith, hope and love. May we align our hearts with the Spirit of peace, with the Redeemer of trouble, and with a God who waits with us in the womb of the world for a day when He will make everything sad come untrue. (J.R.R Tolkien)
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