Change and Challenge

It has been 10 and 1/2  years since I accepted my own challenge to begin this blog. I did not know how, only why, I wanted to do this. In the first post, On January 12, 2009, I admitted "Blog? The word is strange to me. I know what it is. I read other blogs. But I do not know how to blog. The word as a verb instead of a noun is vaguely unsettling because it implies an action I do not yet know how to perform. But I will learn. I will. 

Forty one years ago tonight I was beginning the labor that would bring our first son into the light. On that cold Saturday morning, mighty work was required but then came the overwhelming joy. The work that can deliver words that have grown within me into the light of print and scrutiny may be absorbing and intense as well but with joy I ask for grace in the passing on of life and story.  

Again, I have needed to determine to learn, and to ask for grace in the passing on of life and story...

I see that it has been 2 months since I last posted - April 13, 2019. Later, during that night, I fell, fracturing a vertebra in my lumbar spine, launching me into a season of change. I wrote recently about this and Joe's recent vision loss in another blog: https://stonesandfeathers.wordpress.com/2019/06/02/return/

In all the challenge of wearing a thoracic brace for 3 months, beginning daily injections that must be on my calendar for 2 years, managing pain making my own health management a necessary priority while yet being available to Joe, and learning to accept help there has been a great deal for me to keep on changing and learning. And, as I wrote all those years ago, I will.

The Untried Melody
Howard Thurman

I will sing a new song.
I must learn the new song for the new needs
I must fashion new words born of all the new growth in my life---of my mind---of my spirit.
I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before,
That all that is within me may lift my voice unto God.

How I love the old familiarity of the wearied melody,
How I shrink from the harsh discords of the new untried harmonies.

Teach me, my Father, that I might learn with the abandonment and enthusiasm of Jesus, 
The fresh new accent, the untried melody,
to meet the need of the untried morrow.

Source: from "I Will Sing a New Song" in Meditations of the Heart

Our Vitex greens and blooms. Again.

"The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung." ~Walt Whitman