Moment.

I have been working a lot, hopefully burning calories in the process because I have not had time to go running daily like I was doing before the work started, but today was a morning off, so I went. I took my white dog, Jack, with me because the horse-flies don't seem to bother him as much as they bother the black one, Bear; they bother me with my dark hair, but I can deal with them and the dogs can't really.

It was about to start sprinkling and I had my iPod on shuffle, which I never have it on and a Beastie Boys song started playing. My morning running always teach me something because I think. It was that moment in between when the whole world feels like it has stopped rotating waiting for the first drop to break the cloud barrier and start plummeting to the earth, the blacktop I'm running on, Jack's white curls, or the pine trees above us. Nothing against the Beastie Boys, but Intergalactic Planetary just didn't fit the hesitant moment that I was running through.

Running past a struggling worm on the road brought back an old old memory of my brother. We live on a hill back at home in Cleveland, and when it rains we are always in the perfect location to witness a stream of water coming down our culsdesac. The worms come out onto the road in hoards, and my brother and I thought it was our self-appointed duty to save them all, so off we would go shoeless and soaking wet, up and down the road to put all the obviously disoriented worms back in the grass to safety and shelter. We did this all the time and it was wonderful. It was hard to phase us with 'gross things' back in the day.

There was no wind at all besides what I heard in my ears from my own movement, and it was just a still moment. This may sound a bit Buddhist, but I wish there was a way for me to harness that feeling of a moment for when a table gets upset when their Diet Coke taste weird, or when I forget to ask for whipped-cream on someone's mocha. Normally those things are not worth getting flustered with, but it happens. I have been getting sidetracked about my prayer life recently. Things were going better in that area of my spirituality, but lately there are some lame excuses for why I haven't been completely covering my whole day with prayer. I think that the stillness of the air helped me realize that I can have those moments that that God has a hand in all of this: the air, the worms, the diet pop, the running, the reason for it all, the coffee, the seafood, all of it. It's wonderful.

According to dictionary.com:

won·der·ful [wuhn-der-fuhl]
–adjective
1. excellent; great; marvelous: We all had a wonderful weekend.
2. of a sort that causes or arouses wonder; amazing; astonishing: The storm was wonderful to behold.

God's love is wonderful. 'Excellent' and 'great' are not enough to describe it. 'Wonderful' falls short. 'Awesome' does too. None of this that I write or say can come close to describing His love for us but it's what he wants, even if we can't find the words, and just feel the stillness of His presence, it's what He desires. Like the band Edison Glass says "When I'm with you I find myself, I seem to lose him somewhere else. What is it about you that makes me see? You never expected perfection,
All you want is my affection." It's good. It's God.

Today has grown wings and we're welcoming change
With expectation, open eyes, and outstretched arms.
We're asking sweet spirit place your mark on us.
Sweet spirit, let our mortality be swallowed by life.

We're shedding this thick,
Numb and overly insensitive skin
And trading it for something we can live with
To live and breathe without restriction.

Now this is your release.
We've burned out the eyes of restraint.
Don't hold back.
This is the release.
We're changed from within.
Jesus You've proved where the real freedom's from.

Today Has Wings
Edison Glass


With love from the north woods,
M