Making peace with powerlessness

Make peace with your powerlessness.  Those words stuck in the crevice of my memory last night, returning again this morning reaching out and placing a finger on my heart.  It wasn't an accusing finger.  It was more like the end of a beautiful quill tracing words of comfort deep on my soul.  Who doesn't need a little comfort in the face of powerlessness?

Powerlessness doesn't sit well with me.  I'm not good at navigating it.  I am much better at creating strategies to avoid it, pouring myself into avoiding powerlessness at all costs.   Yet, perched on a bar stool in His Next Page's living room listening to Steve Bell tell stories and sing songs in a house concert, those words gripped me.  The words didn't settle alongside, or sneak up behind me.  They grabbed me by the lapels, front and centre, and got my attention.

Puzzlers at work 2017

My mind went to the puzzle we started before Christmas. It had been coming along well.  The edge pieces were all in place with nice orderly piles of like-coloured pieces on the cookie sheet. Quite a few hours were spent puzzling the doughnuts with varying colours of icing together.  We were at least a third of the way to completion, maybe closer to halfway until a little person got in on the fun when no one was watching.

After deconstruction...

All the puzzle pieces were jumbled up during that bout of fun and the edge pieces were no longer connected.  For several weeks I left the messed up puzzle on the table trying to decide whether I had the stamina to try again.  When I do a puzzle the first time, I am excited about finding and fitting the edge pieces and beginning to fill in the centre.  It is a challenge.  Somehow, after the puzzle was deconstructed by little hands I lost my enthusiasm and it felt more like work I didn't want to do.  Work I wouldn't enjoy.

Sifting, sorting, and connecting again

Life can feel like work we don't enjoy some days.  There is stuff that comes along deconstructing the tidy edge pieces of our life that contain the rest of our story.  We are left feeling disoriented and resentful.  How dare life jumble our pieces and our peace? The irony is our pieces get messed up quite frequently but the messes are often small so we race past them failing to realize we were powerless in those moments.  We miss the lessons and the joys we could be experiencing from having to sort through the pieces again getting to know ourselves and our Maker better.  For today, let's try making peace with something we are powerless over - just one thing.  

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