Soft Spaces
I love the soft spaces. The ones with the breaking of natural light through the slits in the shades. Cascading like rippled pools across the floor and the feet of a chair. Soft spaces equate to a quiet peace that seems hard to find, hard to keep, and make time.
Soft spaces are where we find Him the most. Like whispers, he sits in the light, in the mirrored pools that radiant a bit of whimsical fantasy and delight. He sits in the harsh light, in the shadows that bend against the objects that refract. I love seeing the light bounce against the gems on a necklace, casting the shimmering of muted pastel rainbows across the room. I love the way the warmth can still be felt when the light is of morn and the sky is pregnant with new day.
How often do we stop in those soft spaces? For we look at them yearning to pause, to take advantage of that beauty that seems simple yet luxurious. We busy our schedules, our calendars brimming with scrawled writing that make it's own borders around the neatly packaged boxes.
Yet, as we fill up our time, making little for our own retreat, we can't help but look over to those soft spaces as a visual reprieve. I have found myself often tantalized by the need to sit in the splendor, to close up the notebooks and set down my pen. How foreign it feels to me. This quiet contentment. The soft spaces are familiar, but the atmosphere feels new. How often do we find God's love foreign inside of us? Dismissing it as a dream, or a false statement. Instead we should close our eyes and listen. The whispers of encouragement are for our delight. They are to be a cloak to drape across our shoulders, to man ourselves in fight. For the enemy seeps in when we step away from the wild. When we chose the borders of busy instead of the dirt roads of uncertainty.
Perhaps for this season we step out of our packaged anxieties and into the wild. Feel the breeze on our skin, the heat on our temples. Smell the wild earth in full bloom, and trade our outlines of life for the wildness of the sky.
So this is for you, the daughter dweller, the wild hearted child you were made to be. To step out of the to do lists, the busy, the calendar, and step back into the soft spaces of God's love and grace.
