Pillared Passages: Portion One

Written on December 17, 2018.

ORDINARY

12/17/2018

It feels like a holiday to write. To pour the fluid of my heart upon page once more. The dam break of my hushed hiatus. Syntax and syllable surround my sigh, as I search for the perfect phrase from my pallet. The one with which to begin.

Best to simply dip the brush and stroke the page.

Alight with advent, I’ve been meditating much on how many ordinary days Mary made her abode after the angel. After breeze brushed her. After “Let it be to me as you have said.”

When Heaven came with her name upon it’s lips, she could flee or fall. To her knees, to His feet. A glorious genesis that birthed a matter of fact middle. For outside of a carpenter’s dream and a cousin’s leap, there was not much to confirm what she carried.

There were daily duties, a village’s venting and the fear of family.

It was her pause to be pillared that brought unto her the capacity to be still. To make sacred not only the space that occupied her, but the narrow margin where Heaven came and she occupied it. She nestled right inside Heaven’s essence, finding the womb that awaited, so she could become the womb that advent awakened.

She could have returned to the limbed lean-to of her encounter day by day, loitering in a moment past. Or she could bear the very trunk and branch of her experience in each moment’s present.

Because she gave leeway to the ordinary, she could remember the extraordinary. Be its remembrance. Its pillared portal that sanctioned and sanctified the way for others to find Him near and needed.

Her self denial revealed her dependance upon God. She undressed self-reliance and self-sufficiency, laid them bare, so a world could be robed righteous.

Her outward remained ordinary, just as the shepherds did.

The angel came and told tale of the Christ’s coming and they went. Right through a tapered threshold that led them to see. Jesus.

Their external edges had not changed. They were still lowly shepherds, sheered by sacred, large with light. Fielded again, they would tend sheep and the opinion of those who looked down.

Yet, they returned, glorifying, wild with worship for the Savior they had seen. The hope they heard, they now heralded. Pillared passages, praising!

That is the scope of this series. To remember and reckon the places where we meet Him and the posture that becomes permanent. To rend the regular, cultivate the common. So He can be found and felt, everywhere. In every moment.

Pillared: With each blog, we will explore the bounty of needing and knowing Him. This week, we will journal a period where we sought to obliterate ordinary. Where the lull between what we could see and what He was doing nearly lured us from instead of lingering us toward Him.

Passaged: Each week, we will invite Him to highlight a passage of scripture that testifies to our becoming through our experience of Him. Our invitation is to journal, define and feat upon the passage until it becomes part of us. Each week, I’ll go live from the Pillared Passages Instagram and set the table with the feast of the scripture that is becoming real to me in my journey.

My passage this week is Micah7:7

But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.

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