outWORD by Matte Downey

The cats woke me up at 5 am to remind me that breakfast was a mere 4 hours away and I must be sure not to miss this important event. There is something to be said for hunger...it is a persistent master. Imagine your life without any pangs of emptiness to remind you to eat and no parched throat to make you reach for that glass of water. Come to think of it, what if there were no yawns and droopy eyelids to urge you to sleep, no bloated bladder to rush you to the bathroom for relief, no shivers and chills to ensure you put on a jacket and boots in winter, and no sharp pain to make you pull your hand away from the fire. All these sensations, some of them not the most pleasant, serve their purpose...to keep the body whole, healthy, functioning, growing, and alive. I am forgetful. I forget to pray, I forget to make an effort to be kind, I forget to be thankful, I forget to repent, I forget to ask for miracles, and most often, I forget that God is really, really, truly in cont...

I have been dealing with a frozen shoulder over the last year. It is not a pleasant condition, for your body just refuses to move in perfectly normal ways for its own undisclosed reasons. After much prayer, six months of treatment, determination, and continuing exercise, it started to move again. Thankfully, the only problem I have had in the past few months has been occasional stiffness which is relatively easy to work out. The word I heard often in my discussions with my osteopath was ‘compensating.’ My body had been through some injury and overuse (which we were never able to pinpoint) and legitimately compensated for the inflammation by limiting movement in the affected joint. However, it got stuck in that coping mode, mistaking it for the new ‘normal’, and by its stubborn refusal to move, spread its atrophy and twisted way of doing things down into my ribcage. The chain reaction of coping and compensating became an immobilizing disability that tried to redefine how my bo...

It is more than a wish. It is stronger than a desire or longing. It draws my soul to things greater than myself and my small existence and dares to dream bigger than life. Hope does not get tired of the wait or disappointed at the current state of things. Hope makes you turn your eyes from the ground where you are plodding to the sky where you want to be flying. Where do you go to get hope? I can't pull it up from within me, I must ask God for it. But it is a gift that requires discipline to maintain. So what kind of day is today? Is it a day where I partake of the gift of hope as I sense it in abundance around me, or is it a day when I must fight to keep it alive? Whether is it easy or hard is not the point. Is it right, is it true, is it honorable, is it loving, is it worth it? Then just do it. Don't give up!

This has been an interesting season for me. In the last four months my identity has shifted somewhat as I have endeavoured to get back to the person God had in mind when he created me. Somewhere along the way I managed to deviate from that true and simple path – it happens to the best of us. We encounter people who reject us, situations that disappoint us, and dreams that seem inappropriate and unattainable when we look at our present state or surroundings. So we adjust, and add, and subtract, and tweak and finally come up with a way of living that will allow us to function reasonably well with minimum discomfort and only the occasional twinge of guilt. But, thank God, he was not willing to let me stay in my carefully constructed lifestyle adapted to fit the demands of the world. Instead, he challenged me to cultivate the high calling of being a child made in the image of God and to live by the principles of the kingdom of heaven instead of earth. One of the side effects of th...