When life is defined by Life...

At once I am giddy and angry, about to burst with laughter and yet clenching tears in fragile fists.

Daring and frightened.

Hopeful and full of despair.

Overcome with joy and sadness so inseparable, swirling round in a deep deeper than any I've ever known.

It's like getting an excellent grade on an exam and the marbled block of joy and fear that steals your breath because you know you have a bigger one coming.

It's what kindred spirits are always battling, because they know they boast a great friendship treasure, but so many of those treasures are swept away.

It's every major decision that freezes solid the will to choose, the future holding endless opportunity or stifling regret.

And this is life.

What to make of it. I don't know.

I always seem to be waiting for the day when the spinning will stop. When all will be still and I'll finally be able to see where I'm going, to see through the agitated foam of endless emotion. But if all became so still, I would be dead.

Because this is life. 

This is life in a fractured world grappling for wholeness and the aches and pains and crazy dizziness remind us that when we're looking for rest and wondering which way is up that there actually is one.

There is an up. There is an out. There is stillness and quiet and rest.

And when fear grips even sleep and anxiety invades dreams and giddy bursting joy always seems to end in the bewildered 'but what if?', it whispers in the darkness. No, it doesn't just whisper - it sings.

He sings. He sings over His children.

And His song is grace, and He knows what it's like to walk here, and He still says, "Be anxious for nothing..."

The rest He offers doesn't mean an end to emotion, but to know He makes sense of it all, has a purpose for it all. To bring us into trust.

Trusting is resting.

There is an up. He is up. Fix your eyes there.

There is an out. He broke out of a burial cave in Judea on a Sunday morning 2,000 years ago. Look on His living face and find grace to sustain until we too are raised incorruptible.

There is stillness and quiet and rest. In Him who entered our messy world and our mangled lives and is here to daily walk us through.

Yes, this is life. This see-saw of emotion and decision and happiness wringing out tears is life.

And He is Life.

The Way. The Truth. The Life.

Embrace this overwhelming, heart-stopping, raw bleeding, abundant Life.

Embrace Him.