A time to fill in the unfinished places

 

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The week drags and I with it, a balloon beginning out only a third filled, deflating with each passing day. I recall little from this week, except how much my body protested it, from the moment of the alarm's call to the never-early-enough moment I fell into bed. I remember my senses heightened to the downtown traffic, the over packed lightrail train cars, the buses of tourists blowing on their duck whistles, the endless stream of customers always wanting something more from me. I remember how much harder it was to plaster a smile on my face at work, how much a strain, at times, to have to squeeze myself into a role I no longer felt like playing. I remember eating dinners alone, except for the night we ate with friends and I struggled to keep my eyes open, my mind engaged. 

And I remember the struggle to breathe.

I'm not ever aware of my breathing, but those moments when it doesn't feel natural. In these moments, I'm breathing in deep and slow, a balloon expanding and never filling. And how much I long to finish a breath, finish a thought, finish this season with all its not-enoughs. 

At work, my back momentarily to customers, a deep, deep sigh escapes, and with it, air and so much more. These escape often enough they catch me by surprise on their way out, so that I'm like a cat poised on the living room windowsill, watching from behind the glass as the birds alight and fly off in the distance.

Take me with you, I say to the sigh as I watch it soar away and I'm pawing at the glass.

And I know I'm in a season of seasons, in the middle of a book of undetermined length, reading the same page again and again, wondering how long I can stay on this page without losing sight of the Holy. 

I want to finish this season of living in the city - this city that I have loved so much yet seems, at the same time, to be pushing me out of the home as it groans in expansion.

I want to finish my long season at this job - this job that has kept me far longer than I ever imagined, that has been a gift in so many ways, and yet is becoming increasingly hard to show up without glazed eyes and a dull heart.

I want to finish a season of marriage that has, so far, been the only story we've known, the same page over and over. And how we groan to tell, to live, a different story.

I want to turn the page on the unfinished, to finish well, to live the next chapter. And I don't know the answers to all the questions that crop up on repeat each time I read this page, except, this UnFinished is the story right now, whether I like it or not. How to live it, to surrender daily to it, to fill lungs and heart that gasp for fullness of breath, these are the real questions whose answers are only found in the moments of resting and gazing out.

And it's here, at this blip of words on the page, I see: I haven't been resting or gazing out. I haven't been out in the sanctuary that refreshes my soul, breathing in and worshiping with the choir that doesn't fit within the four walls of a church on Sunday mornings. In this place where I enter into the Holy presence, my lungs will fill, and so will the chambers of my heart. Filling in the unfinished places with enough-for-this-day.


Joining Lisa Jo and the Five-Minute Friday community, to the prompt of "Finish."