Buoyancy and Song



Life isn't so serious like it was last week. 

I think that when you pray about taking life less seriously, God enjoys finding ways to show you what He's keeping in its place.  Then He opens up the rest of the world to be funny.  I am finding it in small places all around me.  In general though, things are more buoyant. 

Doesn't it also help a little to think of the day sticking around longer and longer as spring and summer come to us?  I say yes.



I do this thing where I get a song stuck in my head for a few days, and it's there on repeat with me.  This is the current one.  Want to know why it was so convicting and humbling and big?  The main line of the song is 'Give me a song to sing.'  Pretty simple unless you really stop and think about how it means that God is the one who gives it to us.  He calls, we respond. 

Give me a song to sing

And I will sing it to You God

What if that actually HAPPENED?  What if every day I sang the song of God, and to Him because He's that good? 

My life would change.  My life IS changing, every day with fresh mercies, because of it.  There's this thing we call 'peace that passes understanding'.  And I have always thought that this kind of thing starts in your bones.  I used to think that you didn't feel things in your bones...that instead you felt them first in the mind or heart.  But when I think bones, I imagine the unavoidably big truths or convictions we carry that press in all around us in good times and in really crappy times too. 

This is where God and singing lives in me. 

A few years ago, one of my closest friends told me that the most common emotion I experience about the world is being astonished. 

We laughed about it, but it's true.  I really am, fairly often, astonished by the world.  By the people I know, by the creativity of the weather, by what people wrote in books a long time ago.  Really by all of the interesting things I encounter in the day.  Astonished doesn't mean 'yippy skippy, everything was always going well here', but it does mean you still confront things in the world that are still terribly interesting in the end. 

This week, this song, the lyrics, the timing of it in my life...all of it.....astonished me.

No surprise.  After all, I find I always agree with Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she said, 'Earth's crammed with Heaven, and every common bush afire with God.'