Skip to main content

Bwoo Sky . . . Hide

Last week I went on an adventure. Typically one would not describe their attendance at a wedding as such, but when one travels via plane to attend said wedding with a (almost) twenty-month old, an adventure is exactly what it is. It was altogether stressful and wonderful by turns.

My grand daughter is at that stage where everything is new, and she wants to know the name for it - and then talk about it for the next half hour. One such moment came as we looked out the window of the airplane. We saw the beautiful, crisp blue sky ("bwoo sky"). Twenty minutes later as I tried to distract her from the fact that we couldn't let her get down ("DOOOWWWNNN"), the blue sky was gone. All we could see were clouds. I told her the blue sky was hiding behind the clouds. For the next half hour, intermittently, she told her Momma or me by turns, "bwoo sky . . . hide" and bobbed her head up and down in ferocious agreement with her statement.

I'm sure no one can relate to this (hint of sarcasm), but I have days like that. Sometimes weeks or months - seasons of life that are all clouds. Clouds to the left of me. Clouds to the right. That's all I can see. Blue skies are long gone. Vanished. Non-existent - or so it seems when I'm in that place, but my recent adventure has me thinking. Could it be that no matter the cloud cover, no matter what shade of gray I see, the blue sky is always there? Could it be that the clouds simply block my view? Skew reality? Thwart my vision?

I'm not a meteorologist, so I can't give a scientific answer to that, but the possibility gives me hope; and I think this is my new mantra when life seems cloudy, gray, and depressing. I think I'll hold onto these words and the picture they paint. Yes, when life is less than blue skies and sunshine, I'll repeat those words of wisdom from the mouth of my grand daughter (and bob my head for emphasis), "Bwoo sky . . . hide." That's all it's doing. It's just hiding. It's not gone. I'll see it again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Believing the Lies

My husband and I recently watched The Help - a story about a group of African American women who worked as maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the '60s. One of the protagonists works for a woman "who got no b'ness havin' babies." This woman, this family maid and nanny, tells her little two year old ward regularly, "You is pretty. You is smart. You is impor'ant." How difficult it is for us to believe that about ourselves - really, to believe anything good about ourselves. I always try to be my raw self when I write a blog post. Today is no exception. So I confess that I've been drowning in a storm of lies lately. My head knows they're lies, and I could easily tell anyone else in the same place that they're lies, but I haven't been able to get a grip. There have been so many of them coming at me at once. It seems that I just break the surface, gulp some fresh air of truth then get pulled back under. One thing I know: the enemy of our ...

Christ In You

My husband and I had dinner the other night with some dear friends. Our conversation didn't exactly meander to the topic of God. It was more like it burst into it with both guns blazing, although now, I can't stop my thoughts from meandering back to one simple phrase that our friend said: Christ in me . Several years ago I went through a season of reading the works of some Christian mystics, desert fathers and mothers as they are sometimes called because they separated themselves from their culture and lived in the desert to more effectively spend time with God without the distractions of city life. I read quite a bit of Jeanne Guyon. She obviously loved God deeply, and I learned a lot from her writings, but there was one phrase that she couldn't seem to emphasize enough, and it always bothered me - look within yourself to find God (sounds a little new-agey, doesn't it?) Honestly, the thought has been repulsive to me. It's so contrary to our modern Christian thoug...

As A Child

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...