Day 5: Settled

This is Eddie's room. It was the first room I painted and organized when we moved into our house. I wanted him to have a space to call home. He was nearly a year old and we had spent that year bouncing from place to place. I had a deep need to nest. A deep need to be settled. So did he.

Two years have passed. Eddie's room is still my favorite place in the house. I feel so much love in his room. The bright colors, the cheery memories, my cozy rocking chair -- a vantage point from which I watch him and Andrew grow day to day and week to week. Between the first day we moved in and now, there has been an accumulation of stuff from birthdays and Christmas and trips down to the thrift store on rainy days. Much like silt settles on the bottom of the river, so we find that with the passing of time, layers of stuff begin to accumulate in the rooms of our lives.

As I meditated on today's word, SETTLE, I found myself searching for the balance between rejuvenation and complacency. In one hand, putting down roots and forming a schedule gives us a degree of certainty from which we can go forth into the world with strength knowing we have a place to retreat back to. In the other, settling can create a form of passiveness - the layer of fat around the mid-section, the rut of going to work and coming home without inviting in the color life has to offer. Settling for the life our teenage selves would have cringed at.

I thought of my two boys. How much time I spent settling them down, particularly for bed.  I can imagine God looking down at me when I'm over-tired or wound up with doubt and anxiety and thinking that I need to be settled down. And, the Spirit comes to mother me. To bring me what I need before I know what or how to ask. To help me find calm even when I'm fighting it.

In faith, we need a home base. A place of calm. A place to return to. One that gives us strength to go out and live out our call in the world. For me, I find that in a quiet communion with God. In moments and prayers that become nearly palatable with peace. In weather that reminds me to live my day with gratitude. But I have to remember that this calm, warm hovering of the Spirit is not my journey's end. Rather, a beckoning forward that invites me to lean into the call I was made for.