Cold Day Musings

    I sat on the wood steps outside of our mudroom door. It's cold out here, about 34 degrees tops, but I've got a hot drink in my hands, so it doesn't bother me much. I watch the way the cold air swirls through the steam rising from my coffee and my breath. I've been in a contemplative mood lately. I watch the last robins, juncos, and woodpeckers of Fall and listen to their harvest songs as they ruffle through the fallen leaves, I admire the way the cold sunbeams fall through cedar tree boughs, giving a hipster-ish look and sunflare to this scene. I ponder Life, as much as a seventeen year old Dreamer can.
     I think on how you have to die to live sometimes (1 Corinthians 15:36 "How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies"), how sometimes you have to step back in order to someday step forward. How hard giving things up can be. How weak I am. How great God's plan is.

      I muse on people, on how God has such a wonderful and perfect plan for each of us when He created us, and we all have so much potential. But sometimes we waste our potential. We choose a different path, or decide what we want, and throw away our potential.That makes my heart hurt. That's not to say that God still doesn't have a plan for us, He can still work it all out for good, no matter what mistakes we make. But still. Free will is such an interesting subject, and one I continue to ponder on, and part of me wonders if I'll never fully understand it, like the Trinity. But maybe someday I will. I finish my warm drink and look at the empty mug, still retaining heat even though it's empty.

 I think on a quote in a book I just read again for the umpteenth time, Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot, and the thought strikes me that when we get to Heaven, we'll be all of what God planned us to be. We'll be whole. Fulfilled. Complete. It's so strikingly beautiful. I stand and walk inside, rubbing my chilled hands together to get the circulation going, still thinking on that glorious thought. Another reason to look forward to Heaven.