Face Like a Flint

TulipDance

 

Thank you, thank you one and all for your unbelievably kind, sweet, and encouraging words in the last post! I am indeed surrounded by so many who are supporting me in my recovery. There is much more I could tell you about the last couple of months. So many amazing ways I have been carried and bound up in a wonderful lenten journey. Perhaps someday I will write it all out. But for now, I’m wanting to turn the corner. To round the bend as it were and set my face like a flint to what is ahead. (Isaiah 50:7)

This proves to be very difficult some days. Every few days I am hit with an emotional state which I can only describe as grieving. Perhaps it’s grieving all that has happened to my body. Maybe grieving the life I used to have before surgery and an ileostomy. I don’t really know it’s source, other than medical people telling me it is due to all the medications and trauma I’ve had. Whatever it is, I endure these days only by simply riding them out. BE-ing where I am.

Nonetheless, I want to move forward. Even if it is only baby steps, I still want to look for and rejoice in the small improvements I’m experiencing along the way. One of the days soon after I got home from the hospital, my husband took me to our Ciener Botanical Gardens. The tulips were in full force!! Their upturned faces to the sun made me think of that verse in Isaiah which speaks to setting our faces like a flint, unashamed, unmoved by circumstances, to face what is ahead, whatever that might be. I took a bunch of photos that day.

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And just a few days ago, I felt well enough to stand for a length of time at my drawing table and create this page. There will be more to come. It felt so good to be drawing and painting again. I look forward to being well enough to draw with my friends on Fridays downtown Kernersville. I look forward to being able to drive again and cart my kids to the places they go. I look forward to a lot, and I need patience to wait for them.

Thank you again for your faithful visits here and for comments you make! I read every one of them and they make my heart leap! I hope each of you can find some time to create something. I know it brings healing.

0 thoughts on “Face Like a Flint

  1. Elsie Hickey Wilson says:

    So wonderful to hear of your progress, see your art table and the lovely,fresh, colorful painting! Remember that each of those baby steps adds to all the other steps! Keeping you in my thoughts and prayers! Hugs!

  2. brooksie08 says:

    you are doing a great job staying in present time, trusting in god’s plan and feeling your feelings. you are loved! you are a beautiful and wonderful woman, and I look forward to being with you soon.

  3. freebirdsings says:

    Now how do you paint here and do your famous splattering without getting it on those books, the window or other stuff?

    I remember an old country song that said something like when women find it tough going, they cry but then carry on. We do need grieving time but we need cheering time too. I don’t know the verse you are speaking of in Isaiah but I do know the passage in Ecclesiastes about a time for everything. Sometimes we just can’t move forward without a few faltering steps backwards but as you get stronger I bet the steps back get smaller and fewer till they are gone.

    Love the bright flowers you painted. It’s such a cheerful picture. Hope you are able to move forward not just like flint but like a flint tipped arrow sprung from it’s bow!

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