and counting (James 1)

"Count it all." The good, the bad, the ugly, the humorous and the pathetic. There is a lot to count, once one gets started, throughout even an ordinary day. The difficulty for me, named though I am, is to count it as joy. Not the really bad stuff. That is easier now after years of faith; finding the peace, the joy even in my darkest sorrows. But what about trials of lesser kinds? A few years ago in a Bible study the title of this blog hit me as I realized that I was quite adept at enumerating the various exasperations of my life (and the blessings) but accounting was not the skill my Father had been expecting of me. The clave, the key, is to somehow relax and live fully and happily within each moment because God is here too, holding the universe together and holding my very molecules together. This is the air I breathe, sings Michael W Smith, this is my daily bread. Finding a joy in laundry, in watering plants, in designing a brochure or fighting with a computer program or disobedient child, in searching for the right word in the right language--impossible without the overflowing Spirit of the One Who Knows Me. It's not really even my joy. It's God's joy at watching what he created function in a world begun in a garden and taken now into cyberspace.

My joy so far today has been to get two kids to school, turn my legs to noodles with too many lunges, keep the dogs from bothering the third child while she studies several difficult classes, feed and water said dogs, the new parakeets and old plants in between sorting three loads of laundry. It is my joy to be wearing a nice white T-shirt and bleached denim capris on a day that northern friends are shivering and shoveling. The sky is blue and the air is clear today. Maybe the season of burning sugar cane is past. Even now, nearing the end of the dry season, leaves on trees are shining and green. Traffic hums by on the highway a block away.

I scratched around on facebook and tried to deal with a banking issue. This evening is Jack's therapy and we haven't yet drawn lots on who has gets to go. One of the board members of CCI finally wants an audience and it fills me with more trepidation than joy, but we can work on that! Cliff sits at the desk perpendicular to me working on a paper for seminary. He is not stuck in a library all the time like last year, as a fulltime student, but the classes he is taking still account for the majority of his laboring hours. And here, in the midst and way beyond this existence, is the Spirit of God. Filling, healing, burning the dross and soothing the anguish. And I am counting it all joy.