a thread. a story.

I went on a walk yesterday. It was really cold. but I was somehow rather in sync with my steady gate, the trees around me. It was thirty minutes of peace and release. and music.

and I started thinking about how I have often described my relationship with God like a thread unraveling. There have been seasons, where the thread unraveled rather profoundly, but the farther I get along in the years, the more I realize, it is always unraveling. and it seems the more my heart is open to love, the more it unravels. sometimes painfully.

Growing up in evangelical Southern America, one gets asked many times, "when were you saved?" or "when did you ask Jesus into your heart?"- like Jesus was something you could pick up at the dollar store and tuck in your pocket. I often found this concept confusing- and even felt pressure at times to have this golden moment, when Jesus jumped in my heart like a triple somersault.

As I grow older, I have embraced the idea of being a follower of Christ as being more true to my experience. I cannot really remember a time when my heart was not spiritually inclined. And I cannot remember a time when that inclination was not prone to give way to the mystery of it all. I am thankful that Jesus has always been a part of the story. That he has told it, and led it, so to speak. But if I am honest, I claim no ability to understand it, except that I have been shown a profound grace. and by that grace, I am always following. Sometimes on hands and knees. Sometimes, quite bitterly. Sometimes it feels hilarious and ridiculous, and sometimes it feels so utterly real and true that I am left speechless.

but back to the thread.

this unraveling, has often felt like a tangled mess. but, I think the unraveling is weaving something beautiful. A spool, just by itself, is really fairly useless. It HAS to get unraveled, so to speak, to hold the pieces of something beautiful together. Like a quilt, all made of squares, sewn together to make something timeless. something that covers bodies and adorns beds, and is passed down to many generations, creating a story. a story of lives and families. of love and love lost.

so my point, I guess, or what I am learning, is that following Jesus isn't this once and for all unraveling. The spool is always unwinding, and I am not convinced that we come to end of it until we breath our last breath and see Jesus himself. Is this not the end of ourselves, really? when we finally give way to our brokenness? We finally, in the truest since of the word, are saved?

and then my phone rang. the music stopped. I could hear my newest baby screaming, and I sped up my walk and headed home.