Make friends therefore, with emptiness, and come to know nothing, and you will be full to bursting with new life and sated by wonder.
Silence is charged with, rings with, the power of the unsaid. It gathers it in, pulls it, condenses around it until it must be unleashed as song—released into creative acts. When empty it begins again, reloading, discharging, like a pupil constantly dilating, or a flower opening and closing. Like the ventricles of a beating heart. Like the very breath of God.
Selah
Seed
SEED IS HOW LIGHT ENTERS THE WORLD. Life is made up of pods and cases, wombs, and soft bellies full of newness. Here is my melting pot of creativity, where tiny fish and elegant gazelles alike, peas and wayward souls are fashioned. All is spiralled into form, by light and texture, home and free, made never to be unmade, created for life through death. For all such casings are finite and limited in time.
All eggshells will be cracked open to let life leak out and be born into the air. Each life must leave its cocooned beginnings and breathe the free air I have provided. There are no exceptions to this in my will. For it is not death that you are created for, though you will all pass through it, but for life—life in all its full abundant richness that you will enter and for which you were destined and designed from the first spark—for the universe of love in its full and whole spectrum, every colour expanding to bursting point, like a proud heart full of daddy-love.
There are no restraints here, no smallness of feeling, no holding back. Tides of emotion run deep and true and allow themselves the liberty of touch and devotion, of expressing the grace of God. There is no stiff upper lip stifling of your true emotions with me. I would rather you stamped and raged, toddler-tantrum fist-pumping frustration explosions than stood before me in a calmly exteriored containment of lava. Pour it out and be done with it.
By the same token, let me in, ask me to inhabit every emotion, every hurt, every tired muscle and aching bone, every weary blood cell that will have me, and I will make my home there too. For nothing can hold my greatness, but I can shine it abroad, like the refraction of light from the purest source. There is nowhere it cannot reach, and all life begins from my shining.
Travesties are places where my light seems thwarted, held back, shut out by the blackout curtains of stubborn hearts. Surround yourselves then with givers of light and not keepers of the dark who will try to persuade you that you can exist cut off from me, from your source, from the Light.
Selah
Triumph
TRIUMPH IS NOT THE WINNING AGAINST BUT the winning through. It is the making it to the other side, jumping off the rope swing and looking back, breathless and ruddy-cheeked in glee. It is the deep sigh that says, “It did not stop me!” We can triumph broken, not bitter; crushed, not dismembered. Triumph bears the standard of love held high, looked up to; the light shines from our banners and glints off the weapons we used in brightness, the glare alone enough to send enemies scurrying.
For understand this: there is no victory without me. Without me all is empty shell, open casket, pale and cold. Victory with me is given with shouts of joy and no bloodletting. It is worked with cries and trumpet calls, but also patient sitting and dull waiting. Glory looks decidedly different close up.
Here in my heart, the very definitions of words are changing, coming face-to-face with their own inadequacy. For the spoils of war are given from my hand, not looted, and the lands passed on to those I deem worthy, my trust-friends and confidantes. The good earth is given as territories to those who will husband it with tender hearts and soiled hands.
I eschew the rich and the powerful who do not want to get their hands dirty or their hearts broken.
For my people are the broken in heart and the crushed in spirit, the low and the humble, who tend their own roots before pruning the branches of others, and their soft, brittle wondering warms my heart. These are my beloved dear ones, the lost and confused, the uncertain and the wounded. Dismiss them at your peril, for you send me away with them! If you want to find me, look here first, among the discarded and bereft, and do not speak to me of rewards and revival until you have lived a time in their love.
I take no prisoners, no tepid self-servers who will not give me their whole hearts. I am in the business of freedom and completion, redemption and blessing. Your boldness will not serve you here. Remember your knees and what they are for. When you can bend, you will rise my children. Remember your neck and what it is for; when its stiffness can bow, then your heads will be lifted lovingly. This is my way, dusty and true. Walk in it.
Selah
Diamonds
DIAMONDS AMONG MEN, WOMEN, and children are those who seek me out by seeking the good and humble hearts in themselves and others. For it is the childlike, pure-souled and helpless who can truly see goodness. The clever judge everything and think themselves wise. The wicked see only what might profit them, and the strong lambast anyone who tries to offer them aid or succour.
Do you see, my beloved, how much these things impede the flow of my kingdom? Therefore, seek not the smart, the selfish or the self-sufficient, for in their hearts and minds they are already saved and healed, whole and presumptuous in their perfection, when the reality is far from this.
This is what is meant by “if you lose your life you will gain it,” for it is only those who speak of their own unworthiness who become worthy, and only those who give up their hearts willingly who can truly love the world into submission.
I love everyone with an equal and unmatched passion, which even the universe balks at. Do not mistake this or think otherwise. But it is only the few who walk into that love by becoming small enough in their own eyes, who will be utterly enveloped by love in this life.
More is to come, of course, but I do not wish to speak of this yet, for I am like a parent on Christmas Eve who has hidden all the best presents and will relish the giving out on our special day, when there shall be hands clapped in glee and unscheduled dancing from the heart, mine and yours, and the floor of heaven shall rock with happy laughter!
See, I can hardly contain the vision of it, even within myself! But for now, the seedlings must grow to be trained in the Way. I am the Good Gardener, and I may be trusted with all things, from the care of the tiniest wind-blown seed to the mightiest, most ancient of oaks.
Place everything in my hands in prayer, therefore, and like all good under-gardeners, toil and watch and wait. The diamonds are growing. I can hear them sing.
Selah
Time
TIME IS NOT THE THING YOU THINK IT IS. Time is expansive and elastic. It is there to enable and enlarge, not to constrict and confine. Time is your helpmeet, for it divides the day into hours of prayer, of meeting, of work, play, challenge, and rest, and the night into a silent hopeful darkness for denizens of moon-gazing, star-watching, birthing of wisdom. A time for doers, a time for dreamers. Lines may be crossed over or mixed up, yet time remains the same: a watchman on the towers of your life who proclaims the coming of the dawn and the dusk, who sings you into prayers and death alike. But though time seems rigid and preset, it is pegged out as the boundary of an encampment, and the more you savour it, the further the rope reaches.
If
