by Carol Brennan King June 19, 2020

I have been taking a Meditation and Writing Class this week and today the prompt was this: The ———that came to me:

The teacher said just fill it in anyway that makes sense for you. Perhaps words like person, idea, blessing….and honestly, I don’t know what came after that because I knew that was the prompt for me. And here is the product of that prompt, something very convicting to me.

The blessing that came to me today is that I don’t have to know or plan or wonder or guess or work at what will happen to my writing when it is done. I don’t have to account for the time and plan out how I will profit in some way for the time I spend at the keyboard or in my notebook or any journal. They are all just receptacles for what God is doing in and through me at any given time.

God was there when we drove up the mountain and the cemetery called me or was it God who called me to feel that experience, that history, that story, the air of time long past. There was something that day that waited for me to feel it and allow it to enter me to change me in some way I might never really know. But I think that day it was to begin to enter into the suffering of a person long dead because any time you enter into another person’s suffering, you allow yourself to be changed. And that entry into past suffering could make me more ready to enter into present suffering all around me.

I recognize that I could fall quickly into old impatient patterns. I want the answer now God. What do You want me to do with it now? Where should I go? What should I do? But maybe You want me to sit here awhile longer, to listen more deeply, so that when You point the way, I will not see that entry into suffering as my gift, but Yours to me. I must remember that You will prepare all of me before You use me, even if sometimes I doubt that. It is at that moment I must go back to this one – of trust and belief and rest, in You.

So quickly I leave that moment, typing my real truth in this: Today I am hungry to search out new experiences and to re-enter old experiences with this revelation: I must be conscious of these minutes, those minutes in the past, those minutes in the future or, I wonder if it will all be a waste. All the work You did and the path You led me on.

Do I want to be just a wastebasket, for bits of life, of moments of cacophony or music to be dropped into the wastebasket and carried off by some waste management person? Or do I want to hold on to these thoughts, taste them, save them for after dinner, a dessert that has no calories but fills me with joy and hope and learning – a gift to treasure, trusting that You will show me what to do with them and when?