Divine

It's snowing outside.  Not the blizzard like snow or the stuff that really accumulates.  I think it's movie snow.  Girlfriends have talked of it lately; they want movie snow.

I joked of setting up wind machines and getting bleached corn flakes or shredded foam to make them "movie" snow.  Now as I look outside I see what they meant.  Like looking through a filter of white flakes--everything seems pretty.

The wind has been blowing too much for me.  The umbrellas outside the window are coiled and secured but still they sway and swish and rock, precariously it seems, under the ferocity of the wind's wrath.

Just goes to show: life is not a movie. No matter how I imagine it so, life doesn't flow like a nice little tide story on the silver screen.  Life has plot lines that don't get resolved, relationships than never heal and wind that blows too hard.

These descriptions could all be said of bad movies as well, which are perhaps closer to life than "good" movies.

As I sit here I finish my book, cold tangerines.  It's a book of celebration in everyday life, the extraordinary way God shows up daily, and how all of us are struggling in our own ways to make sense of life and faith and ourselves.

A wonderful friend recommended the book to me.  I love how I think I know her and we get together and talk and I'm still surprised to learn more about her.  Something she dislikes or how her kittens make her and her husband laugh or a new wine she's discovered and loves.

We are so different.  She is quiet and reserved and cultured and intelligent and musically gifted in a way that would make me jealous is she wasn't such a gracious and loving friend.  I am loud and boisterous and like to think I'm cultured and can carry a tune but I don't always think I'm smart.

She is also beautiful and whenever I'm around her I imitate her good posture.  She is so many things I aspire to be like and wish I was more.  And the more I grow to know her, the more I see she is just as human as I am.  She's not perfect or a saint.  She has struggles too.  She gets it right and has great days and weeks.

I find more and more how we are alike.  How our faith and thought process and temperaments are similar.  How these and our personalities weave in our lives to hinder us at times and hold us back from being the women God wants us to be and already sees us as.

The book she recommended, called 'cold tangerines', is a book she owned and let me borrow.  That was a risky move on her part because like me, she highlights and underlines as she reads.  It's one of the most intimate experiences, reading after her.  I'll read and suddenly I spy a marked passage coming or a phrase or sentence highlighted.

It's been a glimpse into my friend's soul.  What I see makes me love her all the more.

I see a woman so like myself, striving to come to terms with life and herself and God and love and everything that happens on this journey, be it what comes or what we make out of it ourselves.

I look outside the window and see those two umbrellas shaking in the wind.  But still standing and together.  I see my friend and me, anchored by God and swaying in the circumstances of life.

It all makes me smile and celebrate this moment.  Amidst the chatter of the barristers, the music playing softly and the customers around, I am sitting here having a sacred moment.  My soul is at peace.  I see the eternal despite the temporal surroundings.  I celebrate my friend, how blessed she is by God and how blessed I am to have her my friend.

This is the day that the Lord has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  Psalm 118:24