Five-Minute Friday Word: Connect

My struggling place. The place where I’ve wrestled with God learning His name…and mine.

Connection is a powerful, vulnerable place. After all, if you choose to connect you are choosing to open up at least part of you to that which you are connecting. And it’s in that vulnerable power-place I’ve met with God and he’s met with me. It’s where I’ve been the most, the best, the worst, the highest and the lowest I can possibly be.

I’ve feared connection most of my life because connection requires risk. I learned at a young age that people and places and things will disconnect from you without a moments notice or a care in the world about how you feel.

The hardest part about those disconnectings is that it’s never a “clean” break–a piece of you goes too…or stays behind. You’re left ripped and swollen and scarred…and scared of the next time someone leaves, idols burn, parents die, loved ones fail, people abuse, worlds collide…silences hurt. Wary. Because it always happens…again.

I’ve feared connection too because there have been times I’ve dys-connected. Connected wrongly. Rashly and without recognizing I’m headed for trouble.  It’s been my deep place of holy hungering, dangerous desire and life-long longing for a lasting, loving connection that’s made this such dangerous place for me.

But God.

Again…but God so rich in mercy has taken these things in me the broken un-connected things and the slippery dys-connected things–and He’s mercied me. He’s mended me. He’s reminded me in His steady, sure Word that He is my shelter and abiding place.

He is my rooted and established vine and in Him I am a rooted and established branch…ingrafted, adopted and accepted. Safe…kept…and finally, fully connected because he is fully faithful.

Five minutes of free writing and submitted to 5-minute Fridays….3 days late!