Monday morning

It rained hard here last night. I love a good thunder and lightening storm. We've been really fortunate to this point with the weather. It's been a fairly mild summer...until now. August approaches in a few days and with it, muggy days and hot nights for sleeping. We've got a window unit in our bedroom but I just can't get comfortable. Too cold, my nose is running, the sound is loud, etc. This ties in nicely with a book I'm reading by Donald Miller called Through Painted Deserts: light, God and Beauty on the open road. It's a true story about Donald and his friend Paul who trade the comforts of Big City life in Texas for a road trip to Oregon in a dilapidated old VW Van to find out about themselves. In it he says:

In all our technology, we have lost touch with the earth, our heaters and air conditioners robbing us of the drama of our seasons, our cars keeping our feet from pacing the land, our concrete and our shoes and our carpet delivering us from the feel of unprocessed earth. We live on top of the world and not in it.

And I can't help but be smacked in the face with this truth. We are a society that is so used to finding ways to avoid feeling uncomfortable. Cold? Turn up the heat. Hot? Turn on the AC. Then there is the whole issue of feeling like everything has to be bigger, better and upgraded. What's wrong with being uncomfortable? Some of our greatest learning lessons are right there begging to be dealt with but we don't want the discomfort. So we run away from the discomfort and keep being presented with the same lessons over and over for years and years until the dysfunction becomes a woven fabric of our lives. What's so fantastic about stock piling our life with bigger and better? If I have a huge home with a big flat screen TV does it make me happier? If anything, it just provides more space for my kids to go off and isolate and more joy for the credit card companies that are feeding off of our inability to say NO to more possessions.

I've been home for a few weeks now. This time has been really valuable for me. I'm finding myself wanting to step out of my comfort zone more and more. I've spent a lot of years running from the discomfort; it's time to get down to the real stuff that my life is made of. There is so much beauty, so much love and so much possibility.