Beginning to {Dare} (A Five Minute Post)

Lisa-Jo invited me to write about my week in just five minutes!

The dare is rich in my bones this week, that dare of gratitude for small things. I keep a list now, and today this is what I wrote:

Thank you for the fresh cold of faces just in from February. Thank you for that feeling of wind on cheekbones, and the feeling of glowing.

I feel glowing this week - walking through brisk winds and bright suns, amid the ideas of great people and the love of many friends. I feel glowing with the promise of what we see when we pay attention. How we see that someone's eyes get really bright, wide and full of wonder when they start talking about the difficulty of understanding where meaning comes from. The way that her warm smile is the first thing that makes peace in a room, and how she wraps you up tight in her sweatshirt arms. How when you walk by an icicle dangling from the side of a building you think, At the right angle that could be a stunning picture... I wonder... and immediately you are composing the shot in your mind. Or when your fingers start to type quick and nimble on their keyboard because the idea is just bursting out of you and you can't not write, you can't not frame the whole thing in beautiful words.

I feel full this week, belly-full of thankfulness and this uncontainable smile keeps creeping up onto my face and I lie in bed wriggling my toes in the morning because I can feel it - God is good. This week has been all Christmas - all full of gifts He keeps giving like the more room I make in my heart the more He can put there.

And I sometimes felt paralyzed this week, the doubt creeping around like a thief in the night. Could God really be giving me all these good things? Is this too good to be real?

And then I hear His voice, strong and rich and golden like Aslan's and His reprimand rings clear: It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

We ask for such little, trivial things when all along the big gift is waiting for us, the big gift that begins in a mustard seed, in a womb, in the small timid "yes" that Mary says to the angel.

Yes, yes, yes. Yes to the big gift I can't contain but that I can enter. Yes to the joy rich and overwhelming, yes to the glow, yes to winds rustling through the branches of my heart.

This is a week of the new dare: {the dare of yes.}

Love,
Hilary