Becoming the Miracle

Detour is the place where I begin to own the brokenness and the beauty, giving each appropriate weight and measure, place and proportion.  Neither dominating the other, neither erasing the presence of the other.  

For we are not in heaven yet, neither this is all hell.

Detour is the place and the season when I realize I need to receive with open hands and open heart their unnerving co-existence as a curious gift from the all-wise God who allows – No! – who appoints both the thorn and the rose.  The sun and the rain. The flower and the weed.

It's the place where I make my peace with both pleasure and the pain - begging for the courage to hold and to let go.

For I am prone to cling to my pain as much as I want to cling to the pleasure. 

It’s the place where I let go – and keep letting go – of my obsession with separating what is good from what is evil, the weed from the tare, and allow the One and Only One who knows all things to make that distinction in His good time.

Detour is the place where I let go – and keep letting go – of my craving for the proof of my faith, as if the Cross isn't proof enough of God's outrageous love for rebels like us. 

It's the place where I learn to satisfy my insatiable appetite for what is spectacular and miraculous, amazing and wonderful by embracing the quiet miracle of an ordinary day and its ordinary ways - cooking and cleaning, writing and reading, algebra homework and shopping for Halloween costumes - that carry no attention-grabbing signs, except, perhaps, the ever-present unfathomable vastness of the sky above it all that envelopes us all.