Silent Invitation
a devotional for late spring
Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
I have to be honest, friends, the more we grow the harder you make this task for me…ALL of your engagement is so deeply incredible and thought-provoking!! Today, I’ve chosen this comment from Brianna Morehead on last week’s post about blessing new garden space. Brianna wrote:
I love the practice of speaking a blessing over the space.
I dont have a physical garden Im growing this year but the soil of my soul feels dry and dusty. I've felt the Spirit wanting to tend to it and hearing you speak about how after the soil is tilled and then cover crops sowed, it was showing me how He is tending to me.
I simply love how Brianna turned a fairly literal post about blessing literal dust into a truly relatable heart’s cry! Thank you, Brianna, for sharing this with us!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
newly clad in springtime green, this crowd of trees bears silent witness to the glory of another day with applause, newborn leaves shaking dancing fluttering like an audience amazed at the first and best magic trick: God has made the vanished sun reappear!
Over the weekend, I got struck by a sudden and intense pain in my lower back. Occasional twinges of back pain are not a complete stranger to me, but nothing like this. This was debilitating. Completely limiting. Walking was a chore. Bending, stretching, reaching was a gamble. Even sitting had to be done delicately.
Now, hear me out: I was raised by very wise parents who taught me that, sometimes, “random” aches and pains may be psychosomatic in nature, brought on by stuffing intense or painful emotions. It all has to come out somehow, and pain is a particularly potent megaphone.
Would they say that all pain is psychosomatic? No, of course not. But it’s worth exploring as a first step before moving on to more dramatic fixes, especially if it comes out of seemingly nowhere. If you can soothe your pain by easing your inner turmoil, why not start there?
I couldn’t pinpoint a way that I had injured my back, a sure sign that this could be psychosomatic. But here’s the kicker. In order to explore my emotional landscape and express what I was holding in, I had to sit still. Stop stressing that the pain made it impossible to do the things I wanted or needed to do. The dirty dishes, garden chores, and other activities on my to-do list would have to wait. I had to turn off the other voices that want to talk over my thoughts: YouTube, social media, podcasts, audiobooks…no matter how good those things could be, I had to mute them and just be still.
I want to say that, here on this Monday in May, I was able to cure my back pain through prayer and meditation within hours of realizing what was happening. But it doesn’t quite work like that. This process can take a few days, and patient repetition and grace are essential. What I can tell you is that an amazing amount of emotions have already bubbled up through all of this, things I didn’t even know I was feeling angry about, or guilty over, or resentful of. They rose to the surface to be witnessed, felt, and placed carefully on the altar, into God’s hands and out of my control.
But also, sitting in the enforced quiet tunes my observational skills in ways I am always amazed by.
As I write this, I’m sitting on the patio with a cup of coffee, the dog curled at my feet. When a breeze blows through and I look over at the poplar trees down behind our workshop, it strikes me that the way poplar leaves move in the wind looks like the way an audience of hearing-impaired folks applaud (in certain versions and dialects of sign language, anyway), waving their hands above their shoulders in a fluttering motion. This silent applause has always moved me when I see it; it’s meant to demonstrate celebration even with a seeming-limitation of lacking the ability to hear clapping palms.
But it’s not a limitation. Not really. It’s an extension, an adaptation. Humans are the worst judges of what constitutes our actual limitations, turns out. How many of what we think are limitations are actually invitations to think differently, focus our attention in ways we would never choose otherwise?
So for however long this back-pain-megaphone decides to hold my gaze, I will choose to see it as an invitation to a quiet that I don’t otherwise welcome. And perhaps, when it fades, some of what it has taught me will remain.
Thank you for reading!
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Thank you for this. My back gives me trouble off and on, and I appreciate the invitation to be still and consider a new way to view the pain.
“It all has to come out somehow, and pain is a particularly potent megaphone.” Never have we heard this better expressed. From personal experience we say “Amen and Amen.”