we will sway but we will not snap.

I said words I knew I didn’t want to say.

Hurtful words. Once again doing the same thing I swore I wouldn’t.

I just wanted to be mad. And I knew that. But I carried on.

The yelling and arguing. For no purpose other than the evil that I will always carry in my heart.

The anger subsided, normalcy crept back in. Dinner was eaten. Kisses exchanged.

I walked down the hill, the wet grass filling my holey boots with water.

I breathed in the pear blossoms, observed the may apples popping up. But kept on walking, right down over the steep cliff, past the fallen hollow tree.

I sat on my log and listened to the creek go by. Opened up Brad’s bible and read a couple of psalms. Being down there seems to be the only way I can connect to God these days, where the only distraction is nature.

I was reading Psalm 116 and the wind picked up The trees creak and I look up. They’re all bending and moving and I start to feel a surge of panic rise up through me. That hollow tree fell only a couple of weeks ago at night during a storm.

What if another falls?   There’s nothing to do but watch, mesmerized by the beauty and rawness that it invokes.

And I hear, “they sway but they won’t snap.”

And I knew it was for me.

I will sway, I will always and often sway from where I want to be. But I won’t snap, can’t snap, because I have the Spirit of the Lord in my heart.

Learn.  Be still.  Be at peace.

“I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong.   I love God’s law with all my heart.  But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me.  Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Romans 7: 21-25