Upheaval is in the air. We must move home. To be honest I don't want to leave where we live, but we must sell and move. I can't imagine living anywhere else. My Husband feels this is the right time for us to make this transition. It is His choice to make, and duty to do so for His mother's sake. We need to be able to pay for her nursing care.
I am strangely thinking about my tomato plants in my greenhouse. They haven't been watered for over a month, they look a bit thirsty but instead of dying they have obviously put down very deep roots. They are so full of fruit. I picked over a kilo of the tiny yellow ones a few days ago. I don't want to start watering the plants as this may make the fruits split. Better to have them small and abundent than larger and spoiled.
I kind of took this as a metaphor for my spiritual life. I do read a lot of texts around the Bible narrative. I am re-reading 'The Particulars of Rapture' which is an in depth commentary of Exodus. I find so much that resonates within me about my own journey with mental illness, and coming to know myself.
I checked out Reb Jeffs posts and left a comment today. It was about how God is enigmatic, and if we had a kind of empirical knowledge of Him, and that was the end of it, there would be no sense of the mystery of God that draws our desire to greater depths. We wouldn't put down deep taproots into faith if we had abundance, knowledge, and satisfaction in competeness. Perhaps that is the desire of the Athiest?
I perhaps see 'faith' as that deep taproot, rather than the water table below. God expresses himself as water that quenches thirst in many passages. Perhaps testing times are those that make us send down deep taproots to find both something to cling to in the grounding of our lives, and also to seek refreshment from the arridness of our own desires and self seeking.
Yes I want a home that gives me a sense of security, and that I will not have to move from. Yet reading The Exodus reminds me that this desire for permanence and security is strangely at odds with revelation. There is a need for instability in our lives, or we fall into a kind of unhearing, unseeing stupor. We have no sense of obsticle to reveal our deepest desires.
This was something that struck me from 'The particulars of Rapture', that those things we see as obsticles, difficulties, setbacks, are in themselves revelations to ourselves, our inner world of hidden desires that we find it difficult to access. It isn't until we begin to feel those turbulent thoughts and emotions that we see what our hidden thoughts and motivations truly are. Events precipitate a kind of open window for us to glimpse our life within.
I have in the past not responded well to stressfull dificult situations. I can't say that I want to move, but I do want an established home that makes me feel secure in the future. This is what I lack at the moment. It may not be a comparable quality of peace and tranquility this home offers.
I simply trust that things will turn out fine... It's just easier to trust God's timing, and that my Husband is right! The alternative is heartache and anguish, probably developing into arguments.
If it is difficult for me, how much more difficult for Him to sell the family home. This is a time to support one another as much as we both can.
We all want to know what the future will bring, but for sure we can only deal with it one day at a time when an elderly and sick parent needs caring for. Yes, it would not be possible for us to care for her as she now needs professional nursing care. This has to be paid for.
The whole Exodus narrative is very powerful, about transition, leaving behind a way of life and embracing a new culture given through events, revelations, and desire for identity. Leaving behind a state of spiritual death; the worship of the known, abundant, ordered world of Egypt, where people were stifled from fulfilling their potential because of 'hard labour and shortness of breath' for the unknown future that seems initially haphazard tenuous and insecure. A place and space that opened possibilities.
A story of moving people, shifting sensibilities, desire to experience, and have a relationship with God. That we have this story of redemption as a constantly aplicable paradigm to our lives, is a gift indeed. How would we know this story if it had not been kept alive through the re-telling. Yes it is freely available to everyone, Perhaps we Christians don't root ourselves deeply enough in the old testament texts. Jesus pointed out that parable of the seeds that withered and died in the sun, but those that grew in fertile ground were strong and gave abundant return. I do like the whole Bible, not just the New Testament.
Right I am off to make a cuppa and not worry about a 'ting'.