You are picking your phrases, your one words, your goals for 2013. You are tending your lists and your desires and I hope your families and friends cheer you on in your endeavors this week.
As you consider what this year will hold, how perhaps through exercise you would like to change the shape of your thighs or the shape of your waist, consider also this:
What does your life hold right now?
What is the shape of your life?
I read Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh this summer. In it, she answers that question. As we consider where we’re going, the most important thing to know first is where we are.
Getting into the shape of your life means climbing into this right-now place, fold yourself into the rhythm of your current truth.
What makes up the silhouette?
What is flowing from your heart?
Where do your feet now stand?
Who is holding your hand?
The shape of my life begins with my family, the five of us living in our home together in North Carolina. We enjoy time together and time apart. We choose love when we remember and forgiveness when we forget. We stumble and then we help each other up.
We have desires for our future and those desires are important.
I am deeply curious about the mystery of Christ and how his life comes out of his people, how his life comes out of me.
I want to learn how to be a better writer, to accept the dare of pouring words over the shared condition of humanity in a way that somehow says to others, Me too and, There’s hope.
As a couple, my husband and I are open to change and transformation in ways we have perhaps never been before. There is beauty in the waking.
I want to be fully alive as the person, mother, and wife I uniquely am, not the one who others think I ought to be. I’ll finish with Anne’s words:
“But I want first of all — in fact, as an end to these other desires — to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact — to borrow from the language of the saints — to live ‘in grace’ as much of the time as possible.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
May all of my endeavors to lead a meaningful life be thwarted and interrupted if I seek to accomplish them in my own strength.
May I ever know the presence of Jesus in the center seat of my personality as the only glue that holds me together.
May I not set off to discover myself, but may I settle in as the person I most deeply am and know he is God.
What is the shape of your life?
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