best reframe in a while

A few days ago, I was walking around the farm, delivering food to the animals and hanging clean laundry to dry, trying to resist garden temptations but failing a little here and there. All the while, I was ruminating and loosely praying, taking stock emotionally, then muscling my thoughts into something more buoyant than they were on their own at that moment, if I’m being honest. I had gotten bogged down by the shadowy side of things again, and it showed in my countenance. I felt the heaviness in my shoulders and caught a reflection of my face, literally scrunched into a scowl.

To feel better, I chose the old trick of simply listing the positive attributes of a hard situation. It’s a pretty reliable exercise. What are the silver linings here? Where are the hidden blessings? What remains good and true and safe? What prayers has God answered already? Just a mental inventory of blessings.

This evolved into giving thanks for so much incredible goodness in our life, not just in the macro sense or for the most basic fundamentals (which we should never take for granted), but for very specific, tangible, customized, worry-lifting answers lately. Then the thanks really started flowing. I started saying thank you for so many awful things that could have happened recently but didn’t. Thanks for the amazing things I believe are happening behind the scenes, in God’s time. Thanks for everything out of our control. Thanks for every burden lifted (and I tried to name them). Thanks for the inspiration and great communication between Handsome and me, for every aspect of our marriage, for our friends and family.

I started naming people in our life and remembered a dream from the night before, where I was just writing down names one after the other on a long piece of lined paper. Names of people we love, people who love us, babies about to be born, people criss-crossing our path in amazing ways.

Thanks for our healthy, healed, beloved animals. Thanks for our crazy farm and our community, who will fill it up in a few weeks. Thanks for the truly magical way we came to live here and all the unbridled wishes the four of us made the summer before we moved. You wouldn’t believe how many of those wishes have been granted.

I gave thanks for my husband’s long, incredible career at the Corporation Commission and even, for the very first time, thanks for exactly the way it ended. Every detail. I gave thanks for commissioners past and present, for the directors, for the employees and industry colleagues, for those who will be our forever friends. I gave thanks for the Oklahomans and good business people who trust their state government to do good, honest work. Thanks for journalists who are telling important stories. I gave thanks, of course, for my husband, who is well rested now and more inspired than ever.

Then I said thank you so much all over again for Dusty coming home safe and happy.

Have you ever been in such a stream of saying thank you that you get the giggles?

It was overwhelming. I felt a delicious burst of energy throughout my body, and I wanted to get back to the house and write it all down.

As I walked back (almost skipping now, no longer heavy-shouldered), a brand new thought occurred to me:

What if this season
is not a hard thing to be endured
but is actually the miraculous answer
to all of our prayers?

If so, this would not be the first time God showed up for us in ways we could never have predicted, ha!

So I decided to chase down that idea a little bit. Just as a little thought experiment, I wanted to see how every circumstance of our life would look and feel if I decided it is all a gift, not a trial.

And I tell you what, friends, the actual colors around me shifted along with my mood.

I have woken up every day since that experience with a flush of curiosity about every little mysterious detail of life. The unknowns that were shadows before? Now they feel like surprises I can get excited about. And the present moment feels like a temporary and extravagant release. I have both slowed way down and somehow managed to extract much more out of my days. This crucial shift in perspective has relaxed my thoughts (and my face, ha!) in ways I didn’t know could happen so immediately.

I understand not every hard thing in life can be reframed this way, but I think a great many of them can. And I suspect more “trials” in my life have actually been gifts I failed to recognize until much, much later. Hindsight is great, but I’m so excited this time to be in the middle of it, wading through the goodness as it plays out scene by scene, infusing the unknowns with joy and gratitude.

This is choosing joy. This is counting it all joy, even the shadows. Especially the shadows.

“A soul who trusts the unknown
pulls miracles from thin air.”
~Matt Cooke
XOXOXO