How Does the Soul Rest?
Resting at the door in the shadow...
I remember putting on the armor of God in our house while Zoe felt the riptides and waves of cancer wash and distract her effervescent sweetness. We spent countless nights, days, and moments reciting Psalms 91. At times when I read Psalm 91, I felt clueless. I would grit my teeth and lift my fist, asking God, “what are You instructing?”...“How do You want us to rest?” I was so, so angry. I felt like I was reading a passage that could lead to an invisible door. If I read the scripture just the right way or just at the right time a door to Narnia would appear. Maybe just with enough hope and faith a miracle would happen; the cancer would dissolve and we would have a map to the treasure of God's cure. Miracles happened to others. It could happen to our daughter too. The problem was, outwardly we never felt like we had the right map. I read and reread, and in those rereading moments nothing seemed to work. The inflection of my voice wasn’t right, or the timing was off. There were constant interruptions of cancer deflated bodily positions. Why wasn’t this living word saving our daughter?
It was the door within I had to go through.
On my spiritual “upper deck” I understood the resting in His comfort of protection. I was able to separate and watch the frustration and confusion pace. This is where our souls felt Holy connection and His grace. Inwardly, like a Captain at the helm of our personal ship, God guided each step. Our four souls desperately roamed from this world to His world trying to find a tangible piece of protection.
God always plays by His rules and rarely do we understand them or appreciate them unless we get what we want. We want to be rewarded fairly. Praising God when you feel like you're being punished, simply put, is freakin’ hard! His plans are admittedly more passionate, more meaningful, and more lasting to life than anything we could engineer.
When we dwell in the shelter of the Most High, it is an absolute choice in the soul. The mind wants to dwell here where we live but the soul wants to dwell there, where we come from. When we choose to go with God’s dwelling places, our bodies respond differently in a soft childlike surrendering way. We somehow turn away from the content of our surroundings and look inward at what He is manifesting. It becomes a place of comfort that even in the darkest scariest storm there is a tent He has provided around the soul. It penetrates you and all of a sudden you viscerally understand the spiritual being having a human experience. We respect Him and follow His shadow; the shadow of the Almighty. However, this shadow isn’t like a shadow of earth--a towering twilight silhouette--but rather a safe crystalized light calling us from home. A pick me up that we respect because it’s constant, true, honest and comforting. The feelings of emotional and physical pain fall away for moments at a time and we can relax in His dwelling.
For Zoe, her tangible dwelling was on her little blue Ikea couch. She requested to be held like a baby in mama and daddy’s arms at the tender age of 14 and 80 pounds. She was physically held, loved, and seen by mighty parents and a great prayerful community. We looked into her eyes, met her just where she was and loved every part of her. Eventually the pain would subside, and her soul would go back to the dwelling place of God under the shadow of the Almighty. It was always the soul that had to go through the door, not the body.
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