I sat on the rickety park bench in my back yard, a pen in my hand and my journal open in my lap. The words poured from my heart onto the page as I cried out all that was wrong with my day…my thoughts…my life.
“This is my life right now:” I had begun, and from there dumped out two solid pages of my heart’s contents. Feelings of loneliness…being forgotten…overlooked…left out and excluded. I didn’t know what I needed…what I wanted…what I was expecting from that time of solitude, but I knew I had to do it lest I suffocate.
As I stood up to go back inside, a heart-shaped leaf next to my foot caught my eye.
___________________________________________________
Several hours later, I walked into the deepest parts of my yard again. This time I carried a cutting board in one hand, covered with the seedy insides of a bell pepper from my lunch, and the paring knife in the other. I spilled the discarded pieces of pepper into the woods behind my house, glancing briefly up into the trees swaying against a grey and darkening sky.
“I wish it would storm,” I thought. The forecast had been promising storms for days, but every time the skies hinted at a spring thunderstorm, the clouds would be carried away and blue skies would return. Thunderstorms speak to my spirit in a special way, and it was always such a disappointment to see the clouds part with no release.
I sighed as I walked back toward the house, my eyes always scanning the ground in front of me. “A storm would perfectly reflect my heart today.”
The breeze picked up a little, causing the grass and leaves at my feet to rustle. Something caught my eye, and as I took a couple of steps backwards to look more closely at whatever it was that I thought I had seen, the sky rumbled. A long, deep, soulful rumble from somewhere deep in the woods.
I turned back, looking up at the sky, grinning for the first time that day. “Thank you,” I whispered, and before the words had fully escaped my lips, another rumble. And then another, each from a different direction. I was surrounded.
The breeze rustled the trees, I stared into the vast gray sky, and wept.
“You see me, God. You see me, and You know. And You haven’t forgotten about me, even for a second.”
He sees us, knows us, loves us. I love that verse and your picture to accompany it is beautiful! (I am your neighbor at Jennifer’s today.)
Storms speak my language too though I’ve never unbraided why that’s so….the release, of course!!!!
So, so glad that His stillness is not an indication of His absence. He never forgets us or leaves us and that brings me peace. Hugs to you.