the outside place.

We were walking through the Cosmosphere when I read about one of the early astronauts and the trouble he had getting back into his capsule after finishing a task on its exterior.

'It was both physically and emotionally difficult to re-enter,' he said,'Physically because the suit had expanded; emotionally because it was so beautiful outside I could not bear to go back in.'

The capsule was his lifeblood for the moment, but was really only a vehicle winging him through space.  The world he yearned for, had worked toward, the summation of his life’s work was outside those walls.

It made me wonder how I define the walls of my world, drawing lines and making demands that shrink life, when the goodness of God is a vast place calling me outward.  It’s not a cramped little cell spinning me forward.

His goodness is the outside place.

The difference is that I can live out there in that beauty, and don’t have to come back in to the smallness I create in order to survive.

-lindasinklings
gathering days.45

'Anne roamed through the pineland
 alleys in the park and, as she  said, let that great sweeping  wind blow the fogs out of her  soul.'

-Anne of the Island, 
 Lucy Maud Montgomery

I found you.

'I found you.'

I turned around to find a set of blue eyes peering from behind the kitchen chair.  He had wedged himself past the table and around the legs of grown-ups to the chair nearest me at the sink.

'I found you.'

I finished spinning the lettuce for salad, watching him play on the floor nearby, my thoughts whirling as I realized I don’t say it enough. 

I found you. 

There you are. 

More often what I say is, ‘Here I am.’

We all want to be found, to know that we are sought out and noticed.  That our presence is noted and a glorious addition to someone’s day.

There you are, I found you.  And I’m stopping just a minute to really see you today.  Because the world is better because you’re in it.

-lindasinklings

gathering days.38