Things are tightening down a bit. And loosening up. My image of God, my perception of the Truth, my model of Perfection. They are being honed in and refined, while at the same time broadening out and becoming more and more universal. It is an interesting process, and one which has proven greatly frustrating, and unbelievably humbling.
It turns out that God is not made in my image; nor does He fit my mold. Any mold I come up with, any vision or model I create, He will burst the seams of and ooze all over my nice, tidy floor. Somehow this is comforting; this knowledge that I am not going to attain the perfect faith here on this earth. The shattering of my illusions is at once frustration and salvation. Frustration when I feel the failure of my model. The breakdown of everything I thought I knew. But also, if I am listening, salvation, because that shattering can be followed by new visions and greater depths. God does not change, but every shattering of my cloudy looking glass brings me a new, clearer vision.
I wrote this quite a few moons ago. In fact, it was quite possibly the first thing I wrote, with the intention of writing, of my own doing. The inspiration to write, even. I had pulled off my month plus of NaNoWriMo novelizing, had been promptly distracted by the shiny things of life, and left the infant novel to die in the ditches of my GoogleDrive. Days and weeks faded away. Months passed by, proving writing to be yet another in a long line of worthwhile experiments gone temporary.
And then my mind started becoming restless. Life was well within the range of normal, with family and faith taking up 99.3% of my time and energy (there were three or four forays into selfish pursuits such as showering). But I had not yet figured out how important writing was to me. How much I needed writing to guide me through the processing of those wonderful focal points of my life. It was then that the many spiritual murmurings swimming around inside reared up one day and demanded to be translated somehow to the outside world.
I was driving along, contemplating why I was unable to let my current stirrings go already, when I realized that they needed an outlet. They needed to pass through. My poor daughter, startled and confused, obediently scribbled down the first two sentences quoted above on the first scrap she could find in our jungle of a van. “Things are tightening down a bit. And loosening up.” She looked up at me quizzically. “That’s it?”
Yup. That was the memory jogger I needed commited to paper in order to bring myself back to it later, at a safer, non-commuting moment. And as soon as I got home, those two sentences were expanded. They didn’t grow too terribly much, but they wrenched free the rusted and corroded walls of the dam, and opened the channel wide.
I found a mysterious file on my computer yesterday, and all it contained were these few words. What a pleasant surprise.
Tucked happily into the gorgeous hills and woods of Wisconsin, I write about life, faith, and the humor that both require. 
Tales From the Nexus 
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