in which lea begins to come to some kind of peace within herself (after throwing quite a pity party for herself last week)...
truth be told, i was throwing myself that pity party all last week (hmmm wonder if there is a board for a pinterest pity party? what kind of decorations should one use? party favors? games to play?) i was musing/moping over it. and wrote little snippets of blogging here and there during the week and kept adding to it as the "injustices" mounted up. and all the while as i was writing it, God was already at work on me...
Psalm 33:22
May your unfailing love be with us, Lord,
even as we put our hope in You.
EVEN AS... not when, not after, not a good while after... but EVEN AS we put our hope in Him.
He brought one of my favorite books to mind... and one of my favorite characters in that book...
i have always been drawn to a character that the traveler meets on his trip to lewis' metaphorical heaven...
a sarah smith of golder's green...
All down one long aisle of the forest the undersides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light. Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.
First came bright spirits, not the spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one side and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians; and after that a lady in whose honor all this was being done...
And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.
“Is it … is it?” I whispered to my guide.
“Not at all,” said he, “It’s someone you’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith, and she lived in Golders Green.”
“She seems to be… well, a person of particular importance.”
“Aye, she is one of the great ones.
You have heard that fame in this country and fame on earth are two quite different things.”
“Who are all these young men and women on each side?”
“They are her sons and daughters.”
“She must have had a very large family.”
“Every young man or boy that met her became her son — even if it was only the boy who brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”
“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?”
“No. There are those who steal other people’s children, but her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their parents loving them more…. Everything that came near her had a place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life that she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them. It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Redeemed humanity is still young; it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”
in the reader's last glimpse of sarah smith, the spirits celebrate her in a psalm-ish song...
The happy Trinity is her home; nothing can trouble her joy....
The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong
turning: but she passes safely through....
She may walk among Lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of
lionets.
He fills her brim full of the immensity of life...
i have always wanted to be sarah smith. i guess i wanted the image of what she is in heaven forgetting that she was unnoticed and most likely untagged on facebook. and i bet she didn't have a blog that she whined in incessantly...
He fills her brim full of the immensity of life.
reminds me of this verse...
Psalm 18:19 He brought me out into a spacious place;
He rescued me because He delighted in me.
He delighted in me. the Creator of Heaven and Earth. the painter of every sunrise and sunset. the grower of trees. He delighted in me. if He had a facebook page, HE would tag me in a status update... "today i am delighting in @leanoblinmarshall." and He would write that every morning. no matter what i was serving for breakfast...
Lamentations 3:21-26
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.”
The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord
i think "waiting quietly for the salvation of the Lord" might be in direct contrast with "writing an entire blog entry on how sad you are that no one tags you on facebook. sigh.
He is my portion. do i really want my portion to be something else? attending a great conference? a trip to LEAndon that is here and gone in one week? and you know it rains in LEAndon all the time. do i want my portion to be merely that i lived with a bunch of extraverts who proclaimed loudly on social media that they went with me to get fro-yo? or a God who put all the stars into place and holds EVERYthing together by His word to KNOW MY NAME? and to have been hilarious enough to give me the name "lea"... which means either "fertile meadow" or "pasture full of cow doodoo" depending on the given day?
therefore i will wait for Him. He is good to those whose hope is in Him. He is unbelievably good to have not despaired/despised me all last week as i kept typing up those strikes against my happiness. He could have smote my computer. He could have virused it all up. He should have.
but instead He just kept sending me reassurances of His love.
stay tuned for more of the story of how the pity party broke up (and what i am going to have to do to make sure it doesn't decide to start up again...)