sitting at the grown-ups table

My kitchen is dark. Actually, truth is, it's not that dark. Not as black as it is just outside my window. I'm huddled at this glowing computer screen, on this round table, passed down from my grandmother who no longer has use for it.

My grandmother would sit at this table and live. Her bills. Her meals. Her weekly plans, journals and candles lit. I, as a 5 year old, would crawl underneath it, hang up curtains around the edge, and dream, dream, dream. But tonight, it's just this old surface that braces me as I weigh truth against feeling. Kingdom-building vs. my dreams.

I've turned off the television and the music, and the only sound that remains is the rhythmic clock hanging near the fridge. The cars hum down the country road, their lights flash briefly against my curtain and then ... gone. Into the pitch. Out where the creek is full and a bullfrog bellows his midnight tune. The lawnmowers are quiet. No tractors plowing in neighbor's fields. No screen doors swinging, or chimes, or even birds. Even the birds have fallen into the dark, swept up their feathers and tucked away.

I don't wish to write. Or even sing. This evening I stare into that kettled black and find it bounces back with an endless silence. Countryside at night.

Anxiety is a shallow thrill that calls to me like a comfort. Luring. Drawing. Attempting to persuade this tidal rush of my soul towards its rocky shores. But my gravity is pushing and pulling against the cross tonight.

With Grace, in grace, against grace. Just when I think I've pulled everything back from my heart to get a good look, He comes in again with a crashing wave. Washing out my sand-built ideas and bringing me back to square one.

That's the thing about Grace.

It is the most vulnerable, rattling, exposing strip of soul I've ever felt, within the confines of the safest, purest, most gentle love. Within this pitch of heart, I'm confronted with a holy tremor that both pulls out my feet from underneath me and gives me wings to fly.

All I know right now is I am content, in this rocking, in this tide. I am not 5 and hiding under wooden chairs and gingham cloths. This table. This round of wood. This center of grace. This is now where I eat, live and learn; not where I wonder, dream and hide.