5 Minute Friday: Rhythm

Today we let our hair down. Today we write a few lines while letting the summer over take us. It's Friday and so here we go, a whole gaggle of us, to write free and fearless. Come and join us!

My 5 minutes on "Rhythm"

Life is full of syncopated rhythms and dissident chords strung together from day to day and it is only those of us whose ears are tuned to the ordinary that can keep time.

I want to keep time. I want to bottle the moments and I just ache so much in the trying.

Her small face peers over the bars of a worn wooden crib, a dropside now banned for safety reasons. I lift her out and the dance begins. A dance that is at times more like a tug-o-war.

I've never been coordinated. I break out in a cold sweat at the thought of taking Zumba- mostly because I am certain that I would knock someone down.I was never allowed to take dance lessons which is probably a mercy for all the little girls my age.

Rhythm. Coordination. Grace.

They are not gifts that I can claim. 

But somehow in this ordinary make-it-through-the-day life I am finding a way to live with all three of these things intact. It isn't always seamless and the cracks are there, but so is the music of a life full and brimming.

There are days when the music is soaring and hopeful followed almost immediately by days that are gloomy and faithless. It is not perfect, but it is my song. The song that God is writing and singing over me.

He takes my two left feet and puts them on His and suddenly I recognize the song. Suddenly all this disconnected, uncoordinated, rhythm-less life is aflow and I am keeping time and He is keeping me.

There between the verses of dirty laundry and chorus of toddler squeals and tantrums is where Jesus can be found holding it all together- marking the time, the days, the way to live life to the rhythm of grace.