Reflective Wednesday

Hope you had a nice long weekend with family and friends! I got to enjoy SLO this weekend with my bestie.

What is it about having a friend come visit and getting to be a tourist in your own town? Somehow the streets become livelier, the shops more interesting, and the people more colorful. If only my eyes were open and ears more clear to this in the everyday.

I have had a keen awareness of my longing to live in the n o w for quite sometime. But it seems like it's become an even clearer life theme as of late.

I hear her words, "Susie, be here now."

I pray about it daily. Asking God to give me the grace to be in the moment, look people in the eye, do one thing at a time. Yet I find myself on-the-go, letting my eyes wander, and multi-tasking.  At the throws of grace but longing for so much more and at times dead set against doing the very thing I long to do.  Sounds like a certain apostle I've read speaking to his friends in Rome.

Which is why this fiction series I've started reading has become such a welcome guest on my nightstand.

I love reading about this small southern town. Father Tim of the local Episcopal church finds himself wrestling with the day to day quandaries of being a minister in his small town.  I meander with him down the streets to the local grocery store, to his congregational office, over to his friend with potential's house next door, into his home with his dog, Barnabas, and the many friends who come to visit.

Now you may be asking, what's so interesting about that? Seems like a book about day-to-day life?  Well, you see, that's just it! You feel invited into the story of lives intersecting in one, small town.  But, you see, it's so inviting and welcoming to read for that very reason, I feel like I'm there with them. And don't we all want to be invited to sit and stay for a while?

Enjoying this series is opening up a little bit more of me to be present in my day-to-day.  I don't want to miss the neighbor, the grocery store worker, the dog, the friends in the church and community by putting on "On the Go Susie" rather I want to embrace and welcome others as "Here for you now, Susie."

Don't you?

Well it's late and I'm going to sign off, curl up, and head on over to Mitford (hope you will too.)