It can all be a bit overwhelming.

Life.

Lists.

Remembering the details. Seems like there’s always too many details.

Life gets too busy and there’s so much to get done and yeah, you’re thinking that maybe you’ve been a bit greedy at the buffet-of-things-to-commit-to, and piled too much on your plate.

Seems like even when you know the power of no, it can be nearly impossible to say it.

Answer that text, reply to that email, pick up the dry cleaning and on and on and on until the days become a maze and we get so busy trying to make it through each moment that we forget to actually be in each moment.

But it’s only in the exact moment of now that we can ever hope to find grace.

This moment, this breath, the sliver of space that is now is the only place joy really lives.

Only maybe we have to choose to enter into it.

Mostly it seems we’re lost in the maze.

Mostly we’re checking things off our lists and checking our phones and checking our email, and stopping to smell the roses feels an awful lot like wasting time.

We tell ourselves we’ll enjoy the big moments. The party. The celebration. The midnight Mass or the sunrise service.

We tell ourselves we’ll slow down for ten minutes, twenty minutes, maybe even thirty minutes a day to meditate or to pray. But first we have all these things to do.

First we have to get through the mundane.

The daily.

The valley.

We’ll celebrate, embrace joy, notice grace, when we get to the mountaintop.

But grace lives in the valley too and dishwashing, dusting, prayer, and play can all be holy moments.

Daily moments can drip with grace if we choose to fully enter into them.

 

I do believe I’ve taken on more than I should have, this season. Oh, but making music is lovely and can there be too much loveliness in the world?

Still, even in the running around and the checklists and the wrapping of those gifts, I can slow down and enter into each moment. And maybe that’s the very best way to joy.

Invite joy into your heart by entering into each moment.

Be fully present in the present, and the present becomes sacred.

Maybe the driving or shopping or working or typing we do is the very door to the Divine.

And maybe grace and joy and peace on earth isn’t so much waiting for December 25th to arrive, but has already arrived and is waiting for us to notice it.

~xo,
LuAnne