Sometimes as a writer, you feel the words form on your tongue before you even understand the sentence end or point. You just start moving the pen, pressing the keys…

Then—there it is.

It comes. It’s what you needed like that touch you wait for from your lover and now you have it. You fill. Is this anything less than miracle?
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The words that come are not for us alone, they are for us to give as much as to have. The experience of this tenderest of love, softening our hearts to the contrasted coldness we often experience, is a privilege to be shared.

Sometimes though I’m so hungry I can only absorb. Like being in a secret garden, I want to stay. The invitation to participate in miracle is frightening at first, and most fulfilling at last. And it seems no matter how many times this miracle unfolds I still come to a place of need again. The temptation to throw hands and words in the air, mumbling something of it being, “no use”, comes strong. That’s OK though, it’s in the recipe of dust water I’m made from.

I’m made of the tangible so I want the tangible. It’s not wrong, but I do have a choice before me. A choice to move the pen or emerge from the garden with bounty to share. But then what, right? It’s scary out there.

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Sometimes, as humans, we are called on to love, to forgive.
We feel the light of mercy burning ’round the wounds before the voiceless, breath-hungry words make their way out…”I forgive you”. This will always be miracle too.

When you know it is Mercy that lights mercy within you, that in itself heals. This isn’t all on our shoulders. Still though, before long we find ourself there again so needful, so green, so wide open, so wounded. The temptation to throw arms and words up, curses and lives out, comes strong. It’s OK, it’s in the recipe of dust water we’re made from.

We can only wait with open arms and hungry skin again.

“Let mercy light mercy. I recognize this is Your miracle and I need You.

Keep me from the sin of not being gracious to others as You have been with me. May Love be the sweet fragrant story of my life, not one of putrid bitterness of life lost. I thirst to be filled with Your love…”

—From Day 7 in Pray, Like a Woman in Labor by Raynna Myers

These needs, these hungry places in us, are our call to worship today, to sing with our lives, our hearts a burning flame. In the flame the old and the dross are burning and His creation in us is forming and shining brighter than we know or understand. His creation in us, His miracle, His grace — our “yes”.

“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God”
–Rich Mullins, Love of God