On Writing I Love, and Exodus

Last night, I stayed up until the late hours of the night, re-reading parts of a favorite book called Cold Tangerines. There continues to be something a little sweet (no pun intended) to me when I read it, because the writer often takes words and thoughts right out from under me, those hard and yet even the soft places inside of me that all function together to make what I know is a special kind of whole. She talks about the extraordinary, and finding it in life, in places you might not think, just in everyday life. I don’t want to duplicate her writing,  but one thing I desire is for people to be able to pick up or start reading my words at any point and feel that they can gather up the whole of what I’m about. That’s how I feel when I read the parts of Cold Tangerines, because I only read them in parts, yet I can still gather up the whole of what she’s talking about and what she's about, the whole of the experience of this extraordinary life. 
 

I read her chapter “Exodus” last night, and it really made me want to go get my hands in some bread and maybe walk around a little, but it was midnight and so I really didn’t feel up to doing either. It also made me want to read Exodus, really read it, but my eyelids won that battle.

I love how with the Bible we can see things that are both very spiritual and then also very human at the same time. We can often find ourselves connected to the stories at a core level; we can see the humanity and the frailty of the people involved and the need for a great, big God being even more involved with those people.

And I can understand when author Shauna Niequist says “there is still this nagging part of me that knows on some deep level that the things we see and touch and hear and taste are spiritual, too. The dichotomy between spiritual and physical doesn’t make sense to me now, because so much of God’s work in my life has been the repairing and stiching together of the two.”

She states that in Exodus, the writers made sure to illustrate that “the olives and the wine and the ideas and the stones and mountain and the soul all matter deeply and signify something important.”

And so today, as I study Exodus and I eat some spinach and beets and walnuts and goat cheese, and I even ate some bread that at one point was fresh, although  it was a little stale today, I think about how so many things in life help me stay connected to God, a God who has redeemed me, who has delivered me in my own life, and been the source of light for my freedom path.  

*Today, I'm linking up with Write it, girl for Tuesdays in March. Head over there to see what others are up to!