May 2024
Oh Change. What a tough cookie you are. Let’s have a look at you.
It's June 2023 and we leave a place we are planted deep deep into the soil, and immediately I am exposed, my roots spindly and bare and out in the open. For months it leaves a gaping hole and a sense of impossibility: what could ever be planted here? A new space is a new problem. And constantly the question lies before me as though the hole is stretching deep and impossibly wide. How will I ever be able to fill this? How can I possibly be enough? Do I really have it in me to start again?
The help, as ever, lands in my pocket, a word from Jesus to hold on to, small and smooth as a pebble, and I have carried it about with me ever since.
It arrived when I was watching a q & a where speakers on shiny bar stools were asked for their one recommendation for a healthy marriage. A lot of good stuff was said, but one comment gave me a little stop.
“Always be willing,” she said, “to fall in love all over again.” Over and over, she said, we are called to say yes again, open our hearts to the risk again, and choose to fall in love with our chosen person, one more time.
“Oh,” I thought. And there it was, that helpful thought in my pocket.
Over the weeks as I turned it over, it began to sink deep into my thinking. It stopped just being a thought about marriage - also a thought about my whole life. Jesus repeated it to me as I looked out on my garden, where all my favourite, carefully transplanted flowers have been munched by pests. “Are you willing to fall in love, again, with a whole new set of flowers?”
He whispered it to me as I sat in my kitchen, which is no longer softness and pastels, but shiny and slick. “Are you willing to fall in love again?”
He whispers it on the street as I pass unknown faces, at the doors of the school where we feel horribly new, in the alleys as I trace the edges of our estate. I hear it again at the back of church as I watch people form into a family, relationships growing like a network of underground streams.
“Are you willing to fall in love again?”
And each time, as I give my small, shaky-breath ‘yes’, a little bit more of the hole is filled. Piece by tiny piece.
How very often it is that I take this work upon myself. How often I assume it is down to me. I am so reluctant to leave the gaps, so scared they will open up and swallow me. I rush to fill them.
“Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.”
Psalm 127: 1
Control is like a locked door.
I want to keep it locked tight, everything manageable so I know I will be able to cope. But perhaps God doesn’t want to let me live in a closed room. Perhaps he wants to give me the whole sky.
The holes are not mine to fill.
The control is not mine to keep.
Because Jesus is not asking for me to build my life at all. All he wants, is the answer to this season’s gentle question: “Are you willing to fall in love again?”
All he wants is my yes.
Always this surprising invitation for more kindness, more abundance of life to romp wild and vibrant through our every day experiences.
Always an invitation for more of him.
“Will you be with me today Katy?”
“Will you let me in today?”
“Will you open the doors of that room you’re creating and join me outside?”
Above all things in the gospels, it seems that faith was the thing that thrilled Jesus. A surrendered heart, handed over in faith. The people who excited him were not the impressive or the powerful, but those who knew who he was, looked in his face and said yes.
I want my life to please you Jesus, not by my work or with my great effort, but by the thing your heart craves, the thing that makes you sing: my small, every day, yes.
Katy x
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© Words and images, Katy Hollamby 2024
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