1000 gifts…
Really only 1000 I thought as I finished reading Ann Voskamp’s “One Thousand Gifts,” and was so excited to start my own blessing journal. The mow over personality that I am thought shoot, I will have this done in about a week!
Well FYI world, 5 years later, I am finally at a full 1300 gifts in my blessing journal after so many discouragements and life interruptions.
Valleys gave way to mountains. Mountains gave way to more valleys.
Rivers washed over me.
Brambles tore at me.
Life just happened and I was standing there torn apart in my heart realizing I had forgotten thankfulness and without it, without it I am nothing, but a shell filled with life’s brambles, thorns, and stones.
We get to those mountain tops and instead of basking in the grandness around us all we see is the journey of work still to do. We start to allow our soul to sink instead of soaring into life’s valleys with anticipations of lessons, new faces, new souls, all new beginnings. Living in a finite body gives us the privilege of starting over fresh multiple times to try and get it “right".
Try to love more.
Be more.
More grace.
Less hate. Being less stressed.
Not trying to kill soul.
We need to quit looking down on valleys like we don’t belong in them.
We tend to think that valleys are for the “wrong” people.
They are for the sinful. They are for the dirty.
They are for the lowly.
They are for people who don’t deserve more.
We scream at our infinity saying that those hard places, those “soul-less” places are for others who wrong people. I am not wrong, am I? I am the one being wronged right?
Now if you really think you are an untouchable and that all the thoughts pouring out of a soul sharing with your soul does not include you, then you are missing out on life, and living a feeling one at that.
Believe me I know.
I lost feeling at some point about 7 years ago and just now I am “feeling” again.
I can taste life again.
Breathe it in again.
See it for all its scars and beauties again. I can FEEL again.
I have walked the forsaken path of the void and it is a hard pill to swallow. It is one that leaves you missing life. You are meant to run your soul’s hand over life and feel it for what it truly is, in all its messiness and loveliness. Not to say the Creator had forsaken me all those years ago; rather, I had forsaken my own soul's calling when the deep called I refused to let it call back. I built the wall, bricked up the doorway, barred the window; what have you, I shut myself away from feeling.
There are moments in life where your soul, if not totally crushed, will ripped apart the barriers from the inside out and you will feel a rush of life that almost suffocates you from all the “oxygen” because you have depraved your soul so long of it. In reverse effect you can almost drown on too much.
I met that crossroads in my life where personalities, relationships, circumstances, and finances where my soul was so depraved that I was living on virtually nothing, just existing in a feelingless void.
Then, a rush came bursting through.
That faint whisper cried out.
I felt jolted to life again.
I opened my eyes to what I had tried to STOP seeing.
I opened my soul up to feeling again.
The boundaries were shattered, and I breathed deeply of an infinity I was missing.
I had been trampling my own sacred ground quite successfully without anyone's help. It is more convenient to blame someone at times for my heartlessness and unfeeling, but in the end, I finally fell to the barren ground of my soul and cried out to the maker to make it fertile again.
Rain down mercy.
Rain down judgement.
Rain down reconciliation.
Rain down closure.
Rain down love.
Rain down contentment.
I needed my soul to be rebuilt.
And who else to rebuild it then the one who made it.
Today I am far from the person I want to be, but I am well on my way to being the person I was meant to be. My soul is drinking deep of the depths it has craved so long and it is filling slowly, ever so slowly. But, for a soul crying out to the darkness screaming for it to be light this is truly a blessing well worth 1000 years of praise.