on the hunt.

As we wandered along the tree-lined streets of Rochester, I know I rambled. I know I probably wore her ear off about porches and hanging plants, victorian spires and the beauty of a wilderness tucked in the middle of the city.

For those few hours, I needed to find it. The wrestle in me to run was strong. The temptation to say "nevermind" to the move and head back to Texas was tangible.

I love Texas.
And I wonder if I will always want to go back.
I miss everything it symbolized for me.
Healing. Community. Growth.
And really, I miss being known.

But we drove and I pictured walking these streets in spring, shoveling through snow in winter, driving these highways to get home.

As Ann Voskamp says in her book 1000 Gifts, I became a "hunter of beauty."

My brother says I edit my life. Last fall we came down off the mountain, and the sun pierced through a grove of trees, across the street from an old church. I asked him to pull over and leaned out the window to snap a photo. I didn't see the dilapidated trailer and trash bins on the other side of the road. Outloud I marveled and he laughed, "You really do edit your life, don't you?"

So yes, I guess it might be true.

Maybe I learned it from editing papers in high school.
Editing articles for the newspapers.
Cropping, tweaking, adjusting, changing files, images, layers, colors, pictures, words.
Really, honestly, it's almost my job.

Finding the beauty and pointing it out. It's not that I don't see the rest. I see it. Every day. Always.

I hear it in e-mails. Grim news from the doctor. Cold shoulders. Broken hearts. Dilapidated trailers and trash bins full of things we've discarded and used, dropped into the dark to not see again. I'm not ignoring my sin-ridden self. I'm very aware, every day, how much I really can't do any of this without the gospel at work in me. I don't discount suffering and discipline. They are very real, raw open things that I too see, feel, experience, witness and grieve.

I see these things. But I'm looking for the spring that fills me to the brim, to cresting and overflowing. The spring that flows for me, in spite of me, with or without me.

On those streets in Rochester, where I search for the place for us to call home, I remind myself that the God is not cradling me in despair. He is good, has good, and does good. I'm on the hunt. Taking the broken pieces of glass, handing them over for this mosaic. Gathering the snapped threads, giving them up for the tapestry.

Cropping makes us focus on the essential. (Sylvio Gagnon)

I ramble to her about the rain that comes in, and I love how it looks bouncing off of the city rooftops. I nervously stutter about the future, a blind soul running my fingers along these new walls. Hunting. Searching.

(adding this to the link up on June 8. love these girls!)