2016) ADORNED

Written on October 5, 2016.

I begin week 55 with an overflowing heart. Thank you each and every who have sent in your journal entries. They have sifted and shaped me over these weeks. I have tasted and seen the richest of fare. So dare I ask for more? I do!! I know you all have not completed all the entries yet. Keep going! And send them. We are so excited to weave the story “Jubi” with your entries.

A huge shoutout to Foley Brown! To date, she has shared the most entries! Thank you Foley!

Though this blog is the last of our Jubilee Journal adventure, a new adventure will begin in a few weeks! Honestly, I need to finish my portion of Terraforming Legacy, we have a journey to a faraway land, we are moving and have a Fitting Room and Dunk back to back, so a few weeks could be a month wrapped in a few weeks. BUT, the adventure will begin before the holidays do. How’s that for commitment?!

And now to the the blog:

Monday evening, we were coming back from “town” and a lovely dinner we were gifted with. I was excited to get home and take a few moments to read the storied sky. It was as we were passing Arubbah, I recognized that the story was standing, bright, bold and beautiful. It hung baited. For there was less to be read and more to be told.

Like a necklace upon the neck of the heavenlies, it dangled and dazzled. A declaration. A witness adorned by the story of a King and His Bride. The moon a crescent clasp with a pendant planet just beneath. The planet’s gleam and glisten breaking the darkness of the night with the passion of Christ. To lift us, light us and lead us. To retrieve and return us.

The reckoning came then. He did it. Again. Invited us to a journey with a destination of becoming. The very thing we thought we were simply walking through. And now, we are not adorned by jubilee, but as Jubilee. We have become. Again.

He asked then, whispering wildy, what gems and stones rest within the ephod of my priestly garment. What will I carry from the year of Jubilee into being Jubilee? My answers came random and rampant.

From feast to feast, some truths needed to be told to my weary, yet wondered heart. Jesus, my sweet Jesus came each and every day from the room He built within His Father’s house to find me ready. When I’m not, He blows the wind of El Shaddai, like a shofar to awaken and resurrect the dormant and dead within me. And she, the Holy Spirit comes like a wrecking ball that won’t allow me to try and present myself. I am to be presented. And so Shaddai becomes the breeze in my billows, carrying me upon the current like a temple treasure to, into the cracked open chest of Pappa. Back to the broken and beating place I come from. Retuned and returned to that which I am of.

And there I discover something dangerous and daring. Ache. His and mine. To ache is part of being made in His image. We reveal Him through it. Waiting well doesn’t mean life without ache. It means to live with it, for it. There is a difference between ache and pain. An ache unexpressed becomes pain that can never be touched again without hurting. When we pack our ache in pain, styrofoam peanuts and bubbled paper, we deny contentment and it become contempt.

Ache and contentment are created companions. Contentment and pain rub each other wrong way. Because contentment doesn’t hinge on what is fulfilled. It is about His sufficiency to complete, not the settling of our temporary circumstances. It is what happens when the desire of our heart becomes Him. We no longer need to feel guilty about our desire because contentment fills our lamps and when the lamp is full, we are ready for desire to be fulfilled.

And one with longing can easily identify the longing of another. We become family then. A deep thing that widens to community. We begin to say things like, “I’ll go with you.” “You would go that far?” “I’ll go farther than that.” Echoes of Extravagance.

Expectancy is no longer waiting with Him to do, but the bursting at seams fulness of what He has already done.

During the year of Jubilee I was planted as a mustard seed of awe in the middle of a great big storm. I was wrapped in Wonder and decorated with Delight. And I will never BE the same.

JOURNAL JUBILEE:
Journal some of your “jubilees”. The treasures you carry to the feast. That which you became.