Puddles

How does a heart survive a storm?  I certainly don’t know how.  A storm can stomp a heart, shatter it even, but it is possible for a heart to break and still survive. This I know with every thread of my soul. This I know.

This is not a post about God picking up the pieces and making something beautiful from the wreckage; He does, oh, He does. But when you are holding shards of your shattered-to-pieces heart in the palm of your hand, you can’t see past the hot, red mess of it all to the place where Beauty is born. You can’t see. You are blind to beauty because your dreams are covered in death’s cloak.  Covered, invisible, gone.  And that is often where the Lie begins to speak. 

I am covered in this mess. 

I am invisible to God. 

My entire being… is gone.

And whether it’s a slow, agonizing death or sudden and tragic, all of life gets tipped upside down as you attempt to sort it out. And in the searching and seeking, you realize that you can’t see.

I took the kids on a walk this morning since it finally stopped raining and the sun showed up after a long vacation.  Flanking either side of the road, ripples of standing water reminded us that there had been a storm. Some were deep and ran like rivers. Others were shallow and still.  My first thought was to classify each one as proof- hard evidence- that a storm had ripped through this place.  But the more I let it collide with the question how, the more it occurred to me that perhaps I was looking at this upside down. 

Puddles aren’t just proof; they’re collections. 

And puddles can be pools of blessing.

Read the rest over at Part of the Miracle.  
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