Run to Joy

These days, I'm really trying to seek, pray, LISTEN, surrender, and follow... in my broken-best, of course. 🙏 I started sharing a couple of humble Advent posts this season and I've been writing off and on about "joy" for over a week, which has turned into a "gloves off" post about tragic death that doesn't really seem all that joyful or all that Christmas-y. Even if we are still in the thick of it (yes, you still can be in the thick of traumatic grief decades later), I think what I have written isn't for right now. Our grief is so much deeper and so much more complicated. A fatal December car accident was the catalyst for a sea of things to follow, and different kinds of deep loss continue to find us. It's the truth. BUT... this is also the truth. JOY and SORROW can be held at the same time. It's life. It's both. 🙏 So for today, I am sharing some of the joy that permeates my mostly ordinary days. ❤️😊 I am enjoying the slow intentionality of listening to childhood records with my grandson and playing games with him that we've had since our own kids were his kind of young. This week, I am also teaching him about the ragamuffin shepherds that were dumbstruck by an angel-filled sky that looked more breathtaking than literally anything ever seen by human eyes. Those grubby old shepherds were also surrounded by singing that would blow away anything the engineers at Bose could ever come up with . It was a sound that only Heaven and those lucky old shepherds have ever heard. Their response? Drop it all. RUN. Recklessly run and get to that smelly stable as fast as possible. Who would even believe what the angels told them they would find? They would, because it's not every day that your eyes and ears have been blasted and disrupted by an other-worldy message directly from God. They didn't have time to doubt, be anxious, feel insecure, or debate about what had just happened. They ran, and under that spectacular star in the home prepared for livestock to reside, they found a brand-spanking-new baby king and they fell to their faces and worshiped with all their hearts. There is no greater JOY than that and they ran right to it and right into it, and they would never be the same. Us, either. ❤️

Always grace,

Shanda