Tag: gifts

Rhythms

MarthaKimball1 Comment

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In our photo-saturated day, taking pictures can get a bad rap.  “Be present,” they urge.  “Put down your camera and enjoy this moment.”  And there are times to leave the camera behind.  Times to rest and just soak and to see.  But I have learned that for me, snapping pictures helps me see.  Helps me notice.  Like a glory-hunter, seeking the beauty in the dreary and ordinary.  Going out with my camera, with expectation to find gifts.  I learned this some time ago from Ann Voskamp, how she numbered gifts with her camera, framing the moments.  Every frame captures a moment, a mili-second of time never to be repeated.  The way after breakfast, they clamber up onto the couch to read books.  On tiptoes at the window to see the garbage truck on Thursday mornings.  The simple beauty of flour, butter, water, and yeast bubbling in a bowl.  The way they run to help whenever they see me drag the stool into the kitchen.  That little gap between his front teeth.  The girl on her trike, far too small for her now, but still her favorite.  The way she turns to see if I am watching.  Always looking to see if I see her.  I do, baby girl, I see you.  The scraggly wild berries and flowers growing alongside the riverbank.  Ordinary, common.  Beautiful.  Hot steaming loaves pulled from the oven, and the way that nothing smells as good as fresh bread at home after wind whipped cheeks and frozen fingers.

Rhythms.  Rhythms of these days.  Simple.  Small.  Barely noticeable.  Easily forgotten.  I don’t want to miss it.  I don’t want to forget.  I want to give thanks, capture the moments, hands full of memories and moments to hold out to Him and praise Him for.  I love this season, I love these rhythms, Lord.  Costly.  Often painful.  Sometimes downright boring.  But precious.  Worthy.  Heavy with the weight of glory.

The Gift Of Time

MarthaKimball1 Comment

Must have been sometime around my first girl’s birth that I stumbled upon her book.  It was a newer release then; she, an unfamiliar name to me.  But something about it drew me.  I started it on a flight across the US from east coast to west, then up to Vancouver, a visit to my sister for her 30th birthday gift.

I had no idea then how impacted I would be by her words, how it would be so pivotal for me to read in that season, with my then 3-month old firstborn, a strained marriage and broken heart.  I had no idea I would think about her words nearly every day since.  Few books come along at just the right time and mark us in that way.  So, you will often see her words reflected or quoted here, as I think of them and return to them often.

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“We are merely moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing” {Psalm 39:6}.

 “I speak it to God: I don’t really want more time; I just want enough time.  Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done—yesterday.  In a world with cows to buy and fields to see and work to do, in the beep and blink of the twenty-first century, with its ‘live in the moment’ buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync?  To have the time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green and time to wonder at all of them in all this light, the time refracting in prism.  I just want time to do my one life well.”

“Time is a relentless river.  It rages on, a respecter of no one.  And this, this is the only way to slow time: when I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.  I can slow the torrent by being all here.  I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment.  And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter.  And time slows.  Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows.” (Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, 67, 68)