roots

In keeping with this week of amor, I thought about doing a “things I love” post, but I can actually do that in one sentence: Jesus, Alex, family, friends, coffee chats, books, teaching, learning, writing, and the ocean.  Me in a list of ten.  So unoriginal.  I toyed with the idea of writing about marriage and how wonderful it is and how I think it is one of God’s greatest ideas—those are true statements, but I have been a bride for all of six months and I humbly admit that Alex and I need to put some miles on this covenant before I earn any credibility to speak wisely about it.

But this time of year, everyone’s mind is on it: love.  Whether you have it, are searching for it, have been broken by it, or are celebrating decades of it, I am willing to bet that you’re thinking about it.  I spent many a fourteenth of Februaries hanging out with my girlfriends, pretending that I did not really want to be on a date with someone special.   I was twenty-five when I met the one, twenty-six when I married him—by no means is that old or on the verge of being what I thought was too late to find him—but I happen to have a group of best friends who found their lifetime love years before I did, so I really felt that longing in the wait for the beautiful thing they had, and I made my fair share of mistakes in the meantime.

…in the meantime… it is amazing how much of our lives we spend in those words.  Until the next thing happens, I’ll just get by the best way I can.  Until I meet him, until I get pregnant, until I find a new job, until I lose the weight, until we can move, until our vacation, until I become that person… in the meantime I will just wait for life to start.  And while we stall and wonder and dream about what could be, what is just passes by untouched.  Too often we live for whatever is next, not for whatever is now.

I did this.  I still do it in many aspects of my life.  But I am learning in the deepest ways that while planning, dreaming, and hoping are so beautiful, those things we are planning and dreaming and hoping for should not disengage us from our lives today.  No, this ordinary Monday is so full of potential, as much potential as the skinnier you, the mommy you, the tanned and recently passport-stamped you, the in-love you has.  We were made to love God and people.  Not tomorrow, today.  Not when we are married or have a mini-van full of kiddos, today. 

The roots of my love for Jesus were put down in the thousands of moments I experienced it in simple, un-glamorous ways.  Phone calls, encouraging letters, prayers of genuine care, laugh until we cry moments, three hour coffee dates, weekend visits, a drive along Highway 1.  All of the right now moments I can easily let myself think are not enough, they really are the best things in life.

I don’t want to miss today and all the amazing possibilities it holds.  I want to let the roots grow right here, even if it takes time or more rainy days than I would have liked to sit through.  If God wants to use our lives today, which He does, He is not going to wait until next week or next year to give us what we need to do that work.  We have it, but so many of us don’t love what we have so we think that this is not really it, not the thing that will finally glue the puzzle pieces together.

The story of redemption we are living in is alive and active.  It is so life-giving to discover the places that God is using people to heal, to fix what is broken, to make things new.  But if we stay in our positions of privilege and entitlement, waiting for the better-than-what-I-have-now object of our affection, we keep ourselves out of the places and relationships that do heal, the ones that are evidence of a living Savior and redeeming God.  Jesus gave us love in abundance, in a measure we cannot even take in because it is so much more than we could ask or imagine.  And this love doesn’t start when we finally get what we have been waiting for, it hangs thickly in the air wherever we go, waiting for us to breathe it in and live it out.

Put your roots down here, in the place you are in.  The seasons of life have a way of producing something beautiful out of something willing to grow.