After the Surrender

It’s been a while since I wrote about the power of surrender, about choosing to “lay down this fight” in which my body was the battlefield, not only for others to wage their wars of domination, but where I attempted to conquer my own physical being, and not out of love but out of loathing.

It’s been a while since I made that choice, and for a few weeks I was able to rest in that place of surrender, trusting that God would bring healing to the deep self-inflicted hurts that had been brought to light.

What a Difference Two Weeks Makes

Greetings, Dear Ones,

What a difference two weeks can make, especially in New England in the spring.  I took a walk again today, and now there are daffodils along the road, and the bushes and trees are showing signs of leaves ready to come out soon.  The little lake at the end of my road has shed the last of its ice, and the muddy road is passable, finally!

But the best part of the change was my reason for going out walking. Two weeks ago I went out after admitting defeat.  I wasn't going to get my dissertation chapter done as quickly as I'd hoped, so I walked away from it to clear my head and resign myself to the delay.  This time it was very different.  I've been revising my writing, and checking my footnotes, and lo and behold, the chapter got sent out at 1:41 this afternoon.  My walk up the road to the lake was a treat, not a defeat.

I found myself thinking about Tolkein again, as I'd done last time.  I was asking myself, was the chapter late?  I'd promised to send it in sometime in March, but that didn't happen.  Then I thought surely by Easter, but no, not even Easter.  And then I'd wanted to send it in by the end of April, and I couldn't even manage that.  But was the chapter actually late?

Working and Walking on Holy Thursday

Greetings, Dear Ones,

Tuesday and Thursday are my "dissertation days."  They have been for quite a while now, and I look forward to having regular, dedicated time to write up my thoughts and researches on three wild and wooly saints of the early medieval period in Wales, Ireland, and Anglo-Saxon England.  I sat down this morning with great hopes of giving the chapter on Cuthbert a thorough once-over for grammar, flow, and accurate footnotes before sending it off to my faculty supervisors.  It was, however, not to be.  Writing two days a week in discrete blocks  like this has left me with a very choppy manuscript. After a while it became clear that this chapter would not be heading anywhere for at least another week.

Sigh. I had so hoped.... Realizing that this relieved some of my self-induced stress, however, allowed me to look out the window with new eyes.  A surprise snowfall yesterday had left many of us in New Hampshire worried that Spring had abandoned us far too soon.  But today most of the snow and ice was already gone, and the outdoors was beckoning.

Spring Cleaning in the Household of God

Greetings, Dear Ones,

The temperature finally got up over freezing this past weekend -- warm enough to open the windows and declare a Spring Cleaning day. I did the three bathrooms and the three upstairs rooms.  My husband cleaned out the fireplace, the porch where we stack the firewood in the winter and enjoy the sound of the nearby stream in the summer, and scrubbed out the kitchen.  Oh, bliss!

The day before, I had just heard the news that an old friend had been elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church.  Evidently the election process was a bit messy, but looking at the ballots posted on the internet, it seemed as though the newly-elected bishop had in fact been the frontrunner all along.  And it got me to wondering, how do we 'clean up' in God's household?  It was a day's work for my husband and me to get our little house sparkling and fresh.  Now my friend has been called to be the head-of-household for over 100 congregations.  How does that get done?