Lent, Day 29: for my Contentment

“Indeed, it may be said that God cannot be known in the mind but only experienced in the heart.” –Steven Levine

In a few months, we are moving out of this lovely little apartment and into a house about seven minutes from where we live now.

It happened so organically– a prayer answered through a relationship, all the details met in every way we could imagine.

We will have that yard to garden and space to run, for our dog to relax and grow older in the sunshine.

So my decorator-mind starts planning how we’ll set up this new home, where everything will go, what will hang on the walls, how we will host guests and practice hospitality.

But we’ve still got four months to go.

So while I’m still here in this little apartment, I’m trying to practice contentment.

I’ve planted seeds in the pots on the balcony again, and I’m reminding myself of the good and kind way God brought us here in the first place.

Lent, and all of life, really, is about the almost-but-not-yet, but while we’re in this not-yet, let’s actually live.

There are no logical explanations for the way we’ve been provided for over these years as a family but through the great Mystery.

There was no reason for a friend to offer us her home simply because she knew we were looking, no reason for things to fall into place that way, but there is a kind Spirit who knows us well.

These are heart things where the mind does not know the territory, has no control.

These are the parts of the journey that make it all worth it, the mysterious things that cannot be explained but only experienced.

The boys and I walked at the park near our new place.

Isn’t that the perfect-shaped path?

There are baseball fields and sticks for Isaiah, a path for bike-riding and blooming trees for Eliot.

And we go there and walk and dream and remember and embrace Mystery, embrace our heart experiences, embrace contentment right here and right now,

and we find that Lent teaches us yet another lesson along the way, and we understand that the journey is not done with us yet.