I love that when I awoke this morning wrapping my melancholy around me, like a toddler clings to a familiar blanket, I was able to make a mumbled, jumbled moan to You, Abba God, lamenting my sadness. “I’m not doing very well, but I do really love You”. My morning prayer.
Sitting on the loo before the sun is fully up. I dutifully pray my daily doxology, “This is the day that the Lord has made I will rejoice and be glad in it”. And I thank You for Richard and Benjamin and Joanna, I thank You for my health, I thank You for my lovely home, and I thank You for my parents. But somewhere in the middle of this doxology, I get distracted and diverted. Instead I recall all the disappointing bathrooms in Mozambique I have known, with their intermittent water flow and grimy shower curtains. The years when water was heated in a bucket using an element hanging from a wire clothes hanger. And I’m filled with gratitude that the previous owner of this house especially replaced her shower-only- bathroom, with an all singing and dancing shower- with-bathtub, to help her sell the house, which is now our home. For though the bath itself is hardly ever used it’s absence would eat away at my peace of mind. Wasn’t all our angst about buying a house with only one, teeny bathroom such a lot of nonsense! As I share this with You I’m engulfed by Your smile and want to shout from the mountain tops, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow”.
A little later I bring up a tray of treats to our bedroom. Hot chocolate, chocolate muffins, biscuits, tea and a mug of hot -water- with -ginger- almonds- honey and apple cider vinegar. First the three in the bed all obediently swallow a vitamin C (Holland and Barret would be pleased.) Then I climb in with them, very ‘snuggly wuggly’ and read to them from our latest book based on the life of Amy Carmichael.
Later still, walking around the garden, eating my jungle oats, feeling the cold dew underfoot (my mother would be pleased) I greet the two rabbits hoping about. Feebee Foe (Flopsy’s new name) hops up to me to say ‘hello’ but skitters away when I try to pick her up. She’s not in the mood for a cuddle’. The pansies are shouting out their vibrant glistening colour and I say, “I see you, you beautiful things” (Prince Charles would be pleased). I place the miniature crystal obelisk in the miniature rockery back on it’s ‘feet’. Some of the rocks travelled all the way from a beach in Salt Rock, South Africa. They look so nondescript compared to their flint-stone cousins, found locally, that I have to consciously label them ‘Proudly South African’ with the help of a small SA flag. I smile at the words written in African seeds that sit perched about the gnarled hand of a small tree, which has been hacked back hard – ‘laugh, pray, dance, sing. My garden does indeed sing out “Praise God all creatures here below”.
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