When life crumbles around you, it does something to a person. In my case, it brought me back to my faith and a farm that resembles me. There are lots of needed repairs to restore it back to its highest purpose. After moving most my life and living abroad twice (Japan and Germany), I now live and love in farm country. Though the past still lays in ruin (dilipated old buildings, leaning fence lines, overgrown fields), I’ve found beauty for ashes. Each day brings bits of restoration and improvement, kind of like me. This farm speaks my life and so I continue my journey among God’s green meadows. My name is Tammy, and I humbly join Emily’s journey here.
For years, I stopped. It started with picture drawing, later developing into drawing pictures with words. Not one who actually kept a journal (although I tried a diary once), I’d put on paper what I couldn’t put on in person. Then I kept them hidden, sharing with my sister or a close friend. Until I came back to the Lord as an adult, I stopped. Cold.
For years, my insides were changed but barely a drop made it to paper. My hands occasionally thawed for small tokens of the inward turning tides. Then, the flood came this past December 2009. The words. No longer stuffed away in a hidden corner, but opened here.
Written words are the very essence of our inside, out. Taking those things meditated in the safety of thought, staking them down and anchoring them in black and white. Those otherwise obscure letters, words brought together for meaning and purpose.
In my contemplation of words, I’m learning more about their revealing, sewn together in the fabric of who we are. They are our insides on the outside. From our heart and experience, we place those inside things out here for others to read and see our inside-out.
Today, I remembered. I was reminded of a word. Love not only is, He was, He came, He died, He lives, He writes. HE too is staked in black and white, anchoring us to Him. If our own written expressions reveal our inward workings, our very guts, then His words do even more. In them, His inside is displayed.
But there is something better than Him writing and His words–it’s Him becoming the Word. Those powerful letters, sewn together brought Life from death, Jesus. Written in Him, the workings of Love. Outwardly clothed in skin, He carried the very inner essence of who He is. If writing is about the inside-out, His word birthed in flesh exposed the very guts and essence of Him. No ink or parchment paper can compare to the tablet of flesh where all of Him was on Him, the written Word.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:1-4, 14
I certainly know the feeling of wearing my insides on the outside. Writing our words for the world to see is a vulnerable, courageous thing. I’m thankful for this reminder that we have a safe place in the One who is full of grace and truth. If you would like to learn more about Tammy, please visit her at If Meadows Speak.
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