Three months ago I lamented the great gaping silence that was issuing forth from the heavens and rending my soul, sure that any hope for the soon-to-come I was imagining was dead and gone, dried up and blown away on the bitter winds of Divine indifference. Then I thought I caught the faint sound of God giggling at me, and I just assumed that it was the derisive laugh of an angry Parent laughing at His little fist-shaking child.
I think now that this only made Him giggle harder. And He's been giggling ever since. What I was actually hearing was the sound of the Great Surpriser of the Universe hiding behind the door to my future with a bouquet of balloons and a chocolate cake, giggling like a schoolboy at the wollop-daddy of a surprise life He's had planned all this time. That door swung open on its hinges at the end of July, and I don't think I've been able to wipe the shocked grin off my face since.
It seems like I'm always drawn back to musical metaphors to neatly describe the messy business of my soul, and what's occurring to me at the moment is that the past few months have been like a really intense piece of modern serious music: a lot of dissonance-- an aching, uncomfortable sitting with a very long moment of no resolution. How any of those clashing chords could work themselves out in my life felt mind-rippingly impossible. I wasn't so good at seeing the possibilities, and I definitely wasn't appreciating the music like a good student should.
But then suddenly, that moment came, when the dissonance broke and just melted into a pure, sigh-heaving, eye-closing sort of sweet music that I couldn't even have imagined before. It was the music of Heaven, of the way being opened to me, of the crooked path suddenly becoming straight. It was a bouquet of balloons and chocolate cake and the grandmother of surprise parties. It was Glorious.
There aren't a whole lot of moments in life when we can really say that we've had a solid, immovable knowledge that we are just exactly where we're supposed to be, doing just exactly the thing we're supposed to be doing. Our purpose and direction are not, for some Divine reason, often made that plain to us. And I'm thinking that the reason for this is to help us develop a little blind faith that the chuckles we hear from Heaven aren't borne of derision, but of adoration; that the crisis we're in at any given moment can inexplicably dissolve into big beautiful; that there is a miracle tucked away inside of each and every moment of longing, just waiting for the door to swing open.
--Teri.
