Hot Days, Hot Girlfriends, and The Middle of the Middle of the Middle

It’s Wednesday. Not only is it Wednesday, it is June 15th. It’s the middle of the week of the middle of the month of the middle month of the year.

Today is the middle of the middle of the middle. It’s the middliest of the middle. In my mind, this is significant.

The “feels like” temperature was over 100 degrees this afternoon. The purple basil, once flush with fresh leaf and blooms I had to pinch back every day, is looking a bit wilted and bedraggled. I hear my grandkids outside my office window, bouncing a basketball in our culdesac as The Preacher cheers their attempts and the sun sets.

In the hot, tired middle, we who are in it need retooling, desperately. After all, we have probably experienced sickness, difficulty, even betrayal, and our wide-eyed innocence is as wilted and weak as purple basil in a hundred degrees. I don’t know about you, but I have gotten older and wiser, and I’m just not mature enough anymore to shrug off cynicism. I have to avoid it. I even have to push back on it, everywhere I see it trying to languish my joy.

The tiniest consolations are as big a miracle to me, now, as walking on water. This world is so rife with strife and war and pestilence, that a glass of iced tea with an Alabamian friend, the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandchildren, or field flowers in the scorching sun, all alike are tender miraculous mercies, not to be taken for granted. Noticing something small - granular, even - something centered in the day I am actually in, pulls me back from the abyss of apathy that so many others in their middle seem to have fallen into.

Today has been as hot as the hinges on the gates to hell, but the birds are still singing out there, delighting in the blue hour. Wildflowers thrive, and wildly so, because they’ve become acclimated to the weather that is, not the managed outcomes of greenhouse conditions.

The Preacher picked up some Chinese takeout for our supper tonight, because I had a magazine article deadline. (I can’t feel upset about this, when I’ve waited all my life to be able to say it!). Of course, I went for my fortune cookie, first. It said:

The one who knows enough is enough, will always have enough.

So, on this middle day of the week, in the middle of the month that is the middle of the year, I stop to say to my soul, “It is enough.” Every ordinary day is crammed with glory, springing up even from roots set in parched, hot earth.

And because “I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate”, tomorrow I leave for Birmingham, Alabama.

Van Gogh said that, and I partly believe it. Because something akin to “fate” crossed the paths of The Preacher and I, with these friends - Mark and Jennifer, pastors of Life of Faith Church in Birmingham. It all began with them being “friends of a friend”, but now I don’t know which friend is the friend of a friend, them, or the couple who introduced us. I reckon we are all each others dear ones, now.

And because I hate travel, and never engage it without a good reason, you could say I’m an adventurer by fate, not choice. Whether it’s Italy, Nashville, France, or Birmingham - it’s all the same to me. I’d rather stay home, but the love of God compels me.

As does the laughter of a good, southern preacher’s wife.

Me, thinking about 18-wheelers on the interstate

I’ll be back, come Monday.

Have a beautiful, middle evening. And then a beautiful weekend, this sweet middle-month.

Mercy In The Middle

“LORD, I have heard of your fame. I stand in awe of your deeds, LORD. Renew your work “in the middle” of the years. “In the middle” of the years make it known. In wrath, you remember mercy.” Habakkuk 3:2

Mercy:

Compassion and

forbearance willingly

shown towards an

offender

All of earth-time is middle-time.

Human history is a hyphen in the text of eternity. It is a mere incident in the context of a God who exists outside of time. Kings and countries are like the mist of an Appalachian mountain: dropping in at dawning, and gone in a glance.

Current events on this world’s stage are like today’s palette of pigments. They exist for this time, for this painting, and will dry up and be scraped away to make a place for the next color story.

I, however, am the daughter of both time and of forever. My time-bound-life began in a gasping second, and will end the same way. My forever-free-life began from the moment of my regeneration. I don’t know how it happened, this miracle that was the awakening of my spirit inside this middle-space. All I know, is at the mere mention of the name of Jesus, my eternal spirit awoke to begin exploration of my life as His idea. My life, as an object of His affection! My very being, as a vessel of His mercy poured out day by day, offense after offense. And oh, how I have offended.

Yet it is my destiny to be loved more than galaxies of stars.

Everything He has ever done for anyone at any time, He is willing to do it again for me.

Every deed He has ever performed to become The Famous One, He is willing to do it again, to show Himself strong on behalf of my generation.

I’ve heard it said that every testimony and every “Amen” is just another way of saying, “We know You will do it again, God!”

Do it again, Papa! Do it again!

Right here, in my middle. In the middle.