22/04/2008

Do not go gently into the quietness, your sword limply falling from your hand. Oh souls, that speak in the dark of light and dreams. Do not go gently into the nothing… of lack of, lack of, lack of release.

Do not flounder here while you wait, waiting for the birth of what you’ve been waiting for. Do not give up. Do not waffle and waver in this valley of bones. They will awake! But you must hold tight.

Hold tight to the sword in your hands. Raise your shield. Roar.

Do not go gently!

Rage, for your soul is dying not by might but hope deferred and now fear of hope fulfilled. You are afraid of what might be, and content to dwell in the absent spaces, content to believe you are

nothing.

But you know they are liars. They who speak of this nothingness and wear it as a cloak, then pass it on down generations and generations. Warriors told to slump in battle and cry all the way home.

You know there is more! So fight. Write. Dream. Live. LOVE mightily and with a warrior’s passion that is untamable. You are untamable butterfly-child, warrior of the light. DO NOT GO GENTLY into the sickening quietness that would seek to lull you to passivity, and passive dreams that never never come true.

Awake. And rage against the sighing. Breathe in your destiny in a moment of fury at those who seek to press you down. Rage against the voices in yourself that seek to squash you also. Oh, do not be defeated.

Do not go gently.

24/02/2008

I have been realizing some things about my life, how things have been leading up to how they are. And I finally think it makes a kind of sense through life with God. I felt a call to leave my home, Canada. I felt a call to write and spark change and do something important. All I knew then in my small mind was L.A. So I went. I went twice… and I learned what it was like to live away from home in a foreign land as a foreign girl with little money, dependent on others and on God. The first time, though I didn’t want to leave, I felt like it would be too hard to stay. I was running out of money and I knew getting a work visa would be next to impossible.

Something about it didn’t feel right. So I went back to Vancouver, did some theatre stuff, travelled, then went back to L.A, to try again, this time to much less success and harder times. When I left to return to Vancouver this second time, I hated returning but didn’t feel like staying in L.A. was right either. Something was just not there. Something didn’t feel quite how it should. Not that I knew how it should feel.

Then I came back, worked at Starbucks and earned some money. But I still felt restless to be somewhere other than Canada and my parents home. I longed to go back to L.A. where my friends were and where I felt my heart was.

And God closed the border to me so I couldn’t go. He took that forward momentum in my spirit and directed it East to Toronto where I worked, grew, lived and spent 6 months unemployed seeking only God and growing in faith. And even during those first 6 months God brought up the idea of Scotland, of YWAM. Even then, though He put it off for a year, time enough for me to grow and change and be ready and raise funds so I could go. He tore down the walls of what I thought was impossible and sent me farther from home than I had ever been only to discover that this, here in Scotland, is where I belong. Where I had never been. That is home.

A while ago, when I was doubting, questioning, I couldn’t understand why God would let me feel that desire for L.A., and it made me worry if I was wrong about Scotland. But this morning I see with clarity. It was not wrong or misplaced for me to feel that. It was just…part of the journey. My mind had not yet expanded its vision enough to realize that God’s ways are greater than mine and the world is smaller than I think. All this stuff in me, my dreams, how I am at the very deep core. Things that whispered in me for decades… those things, God knew them. He made them. And He patiently worked with me to teach me and equip me so I could end up here, in Scotland, writing, praying, dependent on God, stretching myself in many ways, and at home in a foreign land. Who knew?

Well, God did.

And for that I am so thankful!!!!