If you’re in a season of stirring, that’s good!

I’d prefer this to be a Wordless Wednesday, but when the Spirit stirs, I must obey…

Sitting here, typing away at my stack of reports, nudge comes, and I know; someone somewhere (maybe you?) needs to hear it. And here we go.

In Sesame Street parlance, the “word on the street” today is stirring. This word comes in a season of stirring in my own life. I’ve had many of those, and it was during one of those particular seasons that a wise woman reached out, reached up, and turned on a light.

“What I’ve learned,” she said that day, oddly enough, over two mugs of coffee in the local coffee shop, “is that when things are being stirred up in my life, that’s when I know something’s there. And I’ve learned to say, ‘Good!’”

Huh.

I lifted mug to lips, inhaling the aroma, steam-ribbons curling, and I listened.

“When stuff is being stirred up in my life, then it lets me see what’s there, and God and I, we can start to deal with it.”

That was some years ago, the lesson that came, and it’s one I never forgot.

The turmoil and pain and icky stuff of life, I am learning, is like, yes, that mug of coffee. Sometimes, something imperfect happens in the brewing, and grounds are released into the depths. Slowly, surely, quietly they sink, collecting in a sludge on the bottom. On the bottom of the cup, and in the bottom of my heart.

They lurk there, silently polluting, until the spoon swirls through, until the mug is raised, until the depths are disturbed, and then they begin to surface. For all the world like so much junk…

And then begins the scooping, the removing, the cleansing.

For the one whose life is in turmoil today, I am telling you very simply and from my heart what a mentor once told me: if things are being stirred up in your life right now, good!

No, I really mean it. It’s good. I know it hurts like fire. I know it’s gritty and messy. I know that it splashes all over, and life’s not much fun for awhile, but it really is good, and it’s for your good.

How else will you know what’s down in your unseen parts unless and until it comes up? How else will you know what needs healing if nothing ever is hurting? To come out, it must first come right up. To the top. It must be stirred and revealed.

The way to life is through death. The way to heaven goes through hell. For a time. And the way to resurrection is the cross.

It begins with a season of stirring. You’re His workmanship, it’s His spoon moving, it’s His work to complete.

Let Him stir. Amen. Yes, you can.