CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION

Lately, I’ve been strangely hungry for the days I endured last year.

Exacting a life purpose from unexpected circumstance is precisely why I believe we were brought here…

Not to fabricate or invent a reason for existence, but to celebrate existence for its own sake.

In the dead of night, I quietly open my blog to December 26, 2020—

Do we really have the potential to glow [to give off a steady light without flame] even in our weakest moment, even without effort or determination to do so? — 

I wrote that line with less than half of my hair remaining on my head. In the end, when the last of it fell in clumps to the floor, I caught myself marveling at the extent to which I really didn’t care. Discovering who we are—what we value and what deep courage we possess—necessitates being fully present in and through all things. All. Things.

It’s not to say that goal-setting isn’t worthy. But what a marvelous encounter with the Living God the unrehearsed and unimagined brings.

In the calm response to the unexpected, we can hear His whisper, the One who positions himself between the edge of darkness and what He knows we can endure. It is He who awakens Purpose there, in that “in-between.”

Today, above all moments in the collection of minutes in 365 days, the world will beg you to install the most popular tricks and gimmicks to get you through another year.

For an instant, you will believe that the greatest wisdom is not your own.

Yet what we alone have survived is our sage. Endurance is our guru.

Ours is to listen or turn away. Ours is to tell ourselves the truth and then love ourselves, maybe even more, because of it.

We have underestimated the unscripted minutes of our days—the things that make us anxious multiply our steps. The moments that challenge our thinking increase our brain cells. The hurts that make us weep make us just a little more patient, forgiving, tender.

We were wrong to delete them from our story.

These ARE the story—the pieces of humanity that make us more interesting and more remarkable than we will ever know.

To be you—

unsteady and still honest about it,

disillusioned and yet hopeful in the same breath,

willing to expand all that you are,

to evolve and believe no matter what may be.

This is cause for banging pans and blowing horns when the clock strikes midnight. 

THIS alone is cause for celebration.