joy in belonging to God, and His family, in my own loneliness

This Sunday morning I am preparing to go to church, but I lingered longer than usual in bed, struggling of course with a heaviness about myself and my life, and looking deep within myself for sources of joy in who I am today. For someone who has lived as long as I have it is perhaps easier to think badly of myself and what I have not accomplished with my life, etc. etc. and yet I know that the secret, humanly speaking, is to be okay with being me, and the secret, spiritually speaking, is to find joy in belonging to God, and, of course to His family.

So I settled that within myself before I came down for breakfast, and then found two lovely surprises on email. One was a set of photos of my daughters in Uganda with an older friend whom we invited to work with us there over ten years ago, who helped me with home-schooling the girls, and who then went on to develop her own work with orphan boys. She has always been a wonderful photographer, so here she was sending photos of her visit with the girls. It was as if God was adding on to my bottom line joy.

The next surprise was a reply to a comment I put on a delightful blog I discovered in my search for the author of the book I quoted in my last post. I had reached out to see if the author of that blog, a much younger single woman, would be interested in connecting, because I found a similar honesty and frankness about her struggles as a Christian on her blog. In bed this morning I had been berating myself, saying she likely thought it was a silly comment, and why would she want to write to me. Then here was a note expressing her delight in hearing from me, and in reading my post and how it echoed so much with her own experience.

So God has topped up my joy as I head off to join His family at our local church. I am already so much more aware of His love for me, and feel so connected with my own family, and His family, however far away, through email, and now go to celebrate Him and His family in church today. These special joys are all the more sweet because of my struggles as the day began. They are more golden threads, and they sparkle more because they shine amidst the plain weave of my frail humanity and the existential reality of my fundamental loneliness.