Questioning

A friend recently posted a quote from a favorite author, Donald Miller – “If the people who have what we want aren’t happy, let’s want different things.”

That cut right to the heart of where I’m at right now. Having those words running through my mind feels like a curtain being pulled back, laying bare and asking me to see the truth, acknowledge it.

What do I want?

I want a little house by the beach in Leucadia. I want a few acre homestead in the country. I want a home on a mountain. I want to say forget it, sell everything, call it quits on my husband’s job, live in a camper and see everything I haven’t seen. I want security. I want to fly away to the ends of the world but still have a family to come back to. I want to make time stand still and live in the moment where nothing matters except nursing babies and growing toddlers. I want community, I want to do my own thing.

I can’t make a single one of my wants happen and they don’t even match up. I’m a mess of conflicting emotions and so I get up everyday, do much the same thing and search for contentment.

Our disappointing search for a home last year  left me heartbroken, and then it left me free. Free of mortgages, free of needing to own. Free of feeling like I had everything under control. Free of caring exactly where I live or defining who I am by what surrounds me. Free to find power and beauty wherever I might be, to desire knowing Him above all else. Free to wait. To dream and be satisfied.

I’m not sure my husband has felt the same. Reality is you do need a roof over your head and for ten years he has been going to work everyday to provide for us. He strongly wants to protect his family, to provide a good now and future for them. I know a man likes to have something to call his own, to make a mark on the world, every week or two I hear his new plans . . . and I know we can’t just stick our heads in the sand but still I wonder what we should want . . .

so I lean into quietness, strain my ears for the answer, and pray that my husband will listen and hear also

we fumble together toward meaning, towards those different things . . .

“To pray is to listen also, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say. But if I pray only when I feel like it, God may choose not to speak. The greatest moments of prayer come in the midst of fumbling and faltering prayer, rather than the odd moments when one decides to try to turn to God.” – Madeleine L’Engle

and as I drive home watching the sun slip through muted colors into grey behind the sea, it strikes me  how completely unable I am to pull it back from it’s watery bed. The essentials of my life, light and dark, this spinning globe, the rhythm of the air I breath are beyond my reach and still I play at control.

Maybe all I should want is to truly believe down through the depths of me that He knows the beauty and trial each day needs.

9-2012 . some random guys on a roof in Leucadia that let me take their picture . Canon AE1 . TriX400