Today’s post comes from my friend Bree, who I met on the internet. We’re on opposite sides of the globe, but I’d say we’re kindred spirits in our search for an authentic God and an authentic faith. Bree’s words today are quite beautiful and showcase her poetic voice. To read more of Bree’s work, check out her blog.
I didn’t find him in church, though I caught glimpses. I didn’t find her in the bible, though sometimes I could almost hear a gentle whisper in the soft crinkling and turning of those aged pages.
I didn’t find that which we have come to call God with a capital G in works or faith or missions or devotionals or prayer or worship, even though God with a capital G was the reason i was doing them.
I found him in the silence.
I found him where others warned me I wouldn’t: in the doubt that leads to questions that leads to wonder upon wonder and the ever expanding of the universe. From the spinning solar system to pinwheel galaxies and gyroscopes in the sky. I found him in the unexpected places, in the backwaters and the alleyways and the boondocks, crouched down and writing in the dirt. Not always clean, not always palatable, not always agreeable. I found him in the voices and hands and faces of ordinary people. I found him in the way that everyone is an image.
I found him on the slippery slope, the place I was told was dangerous.
I found her in the supposed sacrilige of a shifted pronoun, she was there too. Though not many were looking. I found her in birth, in blood, in the softness and fragility of my babies.
I found her.
I found her in the swiftness and exhaustion of a summer night, leaning into the feathered wind, in feeling her wings lift and enfold. In nestling. In calming my feverish mind. It was then I felt born, in blood and softness and fragility – found.
In the unfolding and the collapsing and the being reborn, in the decomposing, the composting into the the warm and firey earth, in the verdant shoots breaking through the loamy soil. Sometimes I have to dig my fingers into the earth, just to know it will still crumble, just to feel my own substance.
And still, I find him even when I don’t.
Even in absence, I find a presence in the existence of all things. In the gentle heaving of life that branches out its tendrils, in the way that a tree forks like lightning, and rivers flow like blood vessels, and in the way the clouds can ripple like sand in the sky and our universe unfolds in its majesty to bear the synaptic image of the great mind. I find her in the one-ness of creation.
I find her in the way that our skin binds us to our bodies, in the way that gravity binds us to this earth, in the way we are bound to each other – in the way that we are all we have. In the way we are given to each other, for each other. And sometimes, even in the way that we fail to understand this.
I found him inhabiting the other, just as much as me. I found him in those cast aside, I found her fingers and lips smothered all over them, the way that a mother envelopes a stinky, misbehaved child.
I found him in other people. And in the slow revealing of becoming less and paradoxically more. I found her in the stripping back and the not doing.
I found, I found – in my own process of being found, myself.
And discovered it’s not me who’s doing the searching, anyway.
Bree is a recovering perfectionist learning to live life under the assurance that it won’t go to plan. She’s a mother and a wife, a lover of stories, and a self-confessed personality-geek. Bree is passionate about connecting people in community and runs a group for Aussie Female Faith Bloggers: The Priscillas. She would love to connect with you on twitter @failingjoyfully, Facebook, and her blog, www.failingjoyfully.com.
One comment