This is My Story

The sound came from the deepest portions of my soul. Internally I noted to self, how I sang with the full measure of my voice and heart that Sunday. 

Our church is leading a sermon series titled “Heroes of the Bible: Great Women of Faith”.

And I am so deeply affirmed and so profoundly grateful for the Biblical scholarship on the role of women in church leadership across Biblical history. 

Profoundly I say!

Huldah, Deborah, Ester, Priscilla, and Mary Magdalene: all chosen by God to voice God’s teachings and prophecies in times when women were chattel, property. When mere men gave them no voice. God gave us His image and uses our gifts and our voices to influence His church; and has, since earliest Biblical times. 

But back to the music that Sunday.

The hymn was “Blessed Assurance”.

You know it. 

“This is my story, this is my song…”. 

Lyrics so familiar to generations of American Christians of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Never in my lifetime of church education, in Choir School, in Sunday  School, VBS, Youth Group…never was it mentioned that this was written by Francis Crosby, [a female Francis] …Fanny Crosby, a woman. A blind woman of the 1800’s. A woman who wrote hundreds of hymns. A woman who met with U.S. Presidents. A woman who influenced her church.

Soul bursting recognition by our holy God, affirmed by my home church.

This is why I heard my voice sing with the full measure of its soul praising source.

God’s story includes me. My gender. 

Women, His image bearers, fully valued and called by God to teach, preach, and prophesy.

“This is my story, this is my song. Praising my savior all the day long.”

*   *   *

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Adornment of Inner Self

Evergreen boughs bear clusters of beautiful pale blue berries all through the winter. In twilight their color is accentuated, a heavenly hue. Branches hang low at the point of the berries heaviest abundance. 

Arctic gales blow hard across the months of this season, shearing the blue orbs, spilling them to the ground like pearls from a broken string. The female Cedar loses the tiny bits of her adornment with every gust of wind, every icy freeze, and every pelting rain. 

The loss does not diminish the value or the character of this tall spire. She extends her branches with or with out their pale blue adornment. Creatures – winged, footed, or slithering perch, burrow, and huddle within its massive frame. Standing sure, standing strong, standing quietly across the years; simply offering the gentler gifts of refuge, shade, and shelter. 

Prudently placed in the flood plain of frequently overflowing creek beds, the voraciously thirsty Cedar absorbs the over abundance of flooding waters following every storm. This towering life quietly serves her divinely designed purpose within the ecological community through the workings of her quiet, unseen, inner life. 

Season after season I walk past her. A guardian at her post. Season after season, God’s creation provides examples for human living. Here, through a living tree, the words of 1 Peter are given roots. Her berries are attractive, yet transitory. Cedar's deeper life contains the greater portion of her beauty and purpose. A living creation to emulate.

Let your adornment be your inner self,

with a lasting beauty 

of a gentle and quiet spirit.

1 Peter: 3-4

*The Cedar Berry tree of the southwest is technically a species of Juniper.

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Living Art

There eventually came a time in life when a new expanse of freedom allowed me to design how I wanted my days to be filled. 

Instinctively I craved creative endeavors. My interests ranged from typical artistic pursuits of writing, painting, and photography, to the theology of spiritual gifts and  neuroscience findings related to brain function. All under the larger umbrella of creativity. 

An additional layer of my quest at that time concerned the desire to understand how my experiences with creative pursuits dovetailed with a sense of meditation and a sense God’s presence. 

I began studying oil painting in an artist’s studio and spending time photographing everything, everywhere. I wrote children’s stories, memoir pieces about family and professional recollections. I participated in a spiritual arts journaling workshop and began teaching the first of many years of Women’s Bible Study classes. Eventually in this same season I posted the first  entry on Reflections-Beside Still Waters blog. 

The deeply rewarding outcome of these endeavors continue today, with new elements emerging from time to time to constitute the richly woven fabric of a redesigned, greatly rewarding, deeply faith filled, creative daily life. 

“And He has filled him with the Spirit of God, 

in wisdom, in understanding 

and in knowledge and 

in all craftsmanship” 

Exodus 35:31

~

Celebrating with Emily

A Million Little Ways

We Will Make Art 

link up.

Since you call on the Father...

Goodness the wrestling I’ve done; anxious mind work stretched across months. Only brave enough to share my heart-searching chatter with a precious faith-strong few who listen [yet again], who respond with God words that I know, and who point me back to knees-down prayer.

The wrestling is over this: to place faith writing on that World Wide Web, to open soul- private musing to unfamiliar others, to send words seeping from the deeper places of thought out onto screens unknown, to reveal God’s place in me.

Taken to the Book of Jeremiah during Sunday service, reading along, my eyes grow wide as words seem raised, bolded on the page;

“If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless  you shall serve as my mouth.” Jeremiah 15:19

As this message works on my thoughts … a phrase from earlier in the morning surfaces to be strung together with it;

“Since you call on the Father…live your lives as strangers here…”  1Peter1:17

Seeking God’s word makes us strangers in the world. Writing words of faith in public places may fall on uninterested ears, may distance, alienate, and make us a stranger to some.

Yet faith and words, two gifts divinely bestowed are certain, assures Our Lord, to withstand the world’s discomfort. Though this mind wrestling likely will remain constant; “Since I call on the Father” I will endeavor “to utter what is precious” in hopes that it honors Him. I shall follow God as the Sunflower follows the sun.



The heart that has truly loved never forgets,

But as truly loves on to the close,

As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets

The same look which she turned when he rose!

~ Thomas Moore