You know how everyone's always saying seize the moment? I don't know, I'm kind of thinking it's the other way around, you know, like the moment seizes us.

Test me, O LORD, and try me; examine my heart and mind. Psalm 26:2

Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves. Psalm 126:6–7

Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but stands fast forever. Psalm 125:1

Man, my brain just can’t wrap itself around it. The human part of my mind. The rattling news of eastern Ukraine, a northern Floridian boys school, and waiting, waiting, waiting for lab results. Really, LORD? Joy?

And as far as I can tell, testing and trying has to do with going through the fire, to burn out all impurities. And I sure hauled a bunch of them to morning workout.

When the ever-cheerful janitor man at Hillenbrand Pool opened the door for me with a cheery, “Howz it goin’?” I answered, “Pretty lousy.”

But somehow, God met me in the quiet. Flip, flip, five hundred. Flip, flip, four hundred. Flip, flip, three hundred, two times. Distance day.

And oddly enough, for anyone who has ever been to our home that is, the hero who came to mind is none other than Panchita, our housekeeper. She is the one who has stood firm, through all the lousyness, standing fast. And she stands fast listing her woes at a million miles a minute. And she cheats in her storytelling, breathing mid-sentence rather than at ending punctuation, so it is absolutely impossible to get a word in edgewise. But she is full of the sort of wisdom that comes from getting up at midnight to run kidney dialysis for her husband and from grieving the death of her son and from the ins-and-outs of cleaning houses from top to bottom with her handicapped daughter who would rather give me back massages than vacuum and dust and Panchita loves cleaning my house because it is really dirty and she really getting to the bottom of sticky messes and lining shelves with foil which is a little weird but oh well, okay, whatever and sometimes she is late because she has been driving truckloads of surplus produce from warehouse to warehouse and the bus didn’t pick her up and she had to stop off at the drugstore to pick up two medicines and her husband died this week and that will be a big shift but she will stand fast.

And there’s lots of prayer time in this flipping. And my list is long. And I guess the whisper for each of them today has been that each might have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. For him and her and her too. For each of the aching hearts.

And my understanding of all God’s people was broadened yesterday reading Eat, Pray and Love under the eucalyptus tree and watching Boyhood on the living room wall. Lot of tears being sown.

And me. May I too trust in this love. May I too experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then I will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

That we might reap with songs of joy.

And I am of course curious as I head off to seven-hours of guided meditation with a Benedictine priest in a silent room overlooking the Tucson mountains.

Seek my face.

Your face oh LORD, I will seek.