It's been too long since I've been here. My life has been a spring bubbling up and settling down before time is there to catch a cup. I've been scrambling and settled, sorrowful and rejoicing, and impassioned as ever. Analogies land and lift as a new day dawns, and with each entrance of the sun, I wonder how I might channel and spread this current which presses and pulses within.

At just the right time relief finds me. A good word is ingested, a kindly smile received, a ray of beauty penetrates -- and the restless confusion that rises, is stilled. And so it happened in an unlikely way: I received word that my dear pastor was riddled with cancer. My mind took to the reality of his circumstances, and the faith he has possessed for the majority of his life.

My focus on the reality of my current world with my emblazoned attempts to love frightened people, my frustration and sin -- all this collided with the realization of this dear man's ebbing life... and Jesus stilled me in a way that only He can.

We met as a family at our beloved Knoebels amusement park on Saturday, and I determined while crashing into others, that bumper cars are good medicine! My entire soul smiled to see young and old collide and crash with what seemed their entire person. I saw the worn marks of men lifted upwards, the sorrowed-out crows feet smiling at me, and I saw my dad with laughter plastered on a face so familiar. I loved my family deeply, and over funnel cake, lemonade, and roller-coasters, I felt life ebb away, and with it, those fears I have as I embrace the prickly.

I entered the hospital the next day, and the blue of my pastor's eyes poured forth like the sky on the snowy day's reprieve. Eternal love poured forth from that man, and for those first moments, I forgot that his abdomen was held together by string. Love touched me so tangibly, and I felt at home there -- a midst the tubes and turmoil, the object of my affection was so manifest between us that the sterility of that room served only to lift and liven, and fix that chord which binds us so deeply. He asked me to pray, and as the words gushed, my chords locked, and I was transported to what will be.

My computer is now going to die.