Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 20
February 14, 2019
February 15
Hope lingers in the shadows of our darkest times. Hope is precisely what we have when we have nothing.~Betty
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February 7, 2019
Spiritual Winter
Winter is a time of stripping, a season of bleak and barren ground. But just as we see it in nature, we must also go through these seasons in our own tender souls. Seasons when everything is cold, even our hurting, aching hearts.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1
The trees have lost their vibrant leaves. There is a suffering, a sadness, and a death that must occur. And yet even so, transformation is deep at work through this affliction. We find ourselves trying to save the very life we know we are called to lay down and lose. But losing is gaining in Christ, and our only hope for True Life. For the blooms of spring only come forth through the suffering of winter.
Betty so tenderly says,
Painful circumstances that seem so defeating and discouraging are most often sacred gifts holding the seeds of our healing if we will embrace them, persevere through them, and allow them to change us and wake us up to a whole new way of seeing. So often when we are hurting, we run from one thing to the next, frantically looking for a quick fix that will ease our searing pain and restore things to the way they used to be. However, God is not seeking restoration but transformation. The more we submit to and participate in the mystery of this purifying work, the more we begin to experience a sense that everything, even our darkest pain, is held in Divine Love. The Hidden Life Awakened
What we usually don’t realize in the heaviness of winter is that it’s actually a holy winter, where the sanctifying work of Christ has His way in us that the warm, joyful summers never fully could. We trust that His hand is at work even when we don’t feel it. We hold fast to His hope and cling to His grace as He becomes our song in the darkest night – because He is all we have.
Hold fast, my dear disciple.
Love claimed you long ago.
Your grieving is My squeezing,
the pressure of My hand,
a touch that knows your sorrow,
a touch that heals today,
that seals, reveals tomorrow.
BWS
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January 31, 2019
February 1
Grieving our losses is part of God’s ongoing process of redemption, dispelling more of our darkness, bringing us bleeding into the Light. ~Betty
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January 24, 2019
Perseverance and Pain
Betty, our inspiration for The Hidden Life Awakened, encourages us with the hope that we can persevere beyond the pain and endless weight of fear.
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January 17, 2019
January 18
Your pain and your cross can and will speak to the wounded hearts of others in God’s time and in His way. ~Betty
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January 10, 2019
A Letter From Betty
Dear Ones,
If you stopped long enough to take a lingering gaze at me, you would probably surmise that under the snowcap of white hair and pruned face of wrinkles all is well. And all is well. There is within me a deep-rooted wellness that even the unrelenting demands of old age cannot touch. Yet in truth, I am very fragile. I can’t see very well, I can’t hear very well and I can’t walk very well. But, as I said, I am quite well within myself at 93.
What about old age? How do we attain to it and how do we attend to it? Attaining to it is inevitable. If we live long enough we will slowly live into it. Old age is the final season of our lives and it is the most difficult of all the seasons that have come before it. Though the preceding seasons offer us preparation indicative of our choices in the transformation process, still this final season with its diminishments, frailties and closures is brutal and long-suffering. Old age requires extraordinary and unfathomable courage. The pain, impairments…the humiliations of old age are so consuming and deeply afflicting that the cry for mercy becomes the silent but ever-present voice of the soul. It is a riveting, a passionate cry that connects with the Eternal and gives strength to stay the course. If we are to finish well, we must endure our own crucifixion through an unrivaled focus on the Crucified One. Such a privileged suffering is second only to martyrdom.
Our culture shivers at any hint of old age and has little respect for wisdom. It wraps itself in an ethereal blanket and lives an illusion that keeps youth embodied as eternal. Yet to deny old age is to deny an ever-deepening spiritual maturity nurtured in the humility of frailty, its constant companion. It is to deny the vine-ripened tenderness of aging, its mellowing that spills over into the richness of so sweet a love as to stifle us with its fragrance and Its Presence.
In this brief letter, I have endeavored to paint the suffering and imprint the vitality of focus. Darkness and light embrace one another and flow into wisdom, a testimony to the Truth that the darkness has not overcome the Light and that wisdom is a gathering of truths from the Light of each season, the possession of a disposition tempered by fire. Nothing disturbs it. All things are one. Divine Wisdom, the supreme gift of redemption as experienced in old age.
Now is the suffering season of my years
A never ending struggle without pause.
No clarity beneath this burning gaze of age
No drenching rain to fall and cool its blaze
Only the slowed down steps
The heavy load—the cross.
Spirit of Love, a suffering love
My passion.
And though the why of aging, its mysteries still elude me
I know I do not walk this season all alone.
Into the peace of promise I slowly drift
Detached from time, age, and humiliation
Immersed in cool, refreshing streams of grace
Parched lips reach up through sunlit waters
The sweetest of all praise—gratitude.
Spirit of Love, a suffering love
My passion.
BWS
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 1Corinthians 4:16
The post A Letter From Betty appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.
January 3, 2019
January 4
The gift of the Spirit in our hearts is the gift of deep belonging to the Love that lies underneath our awareness; that has been immersed in darkness most of our lives. ~Betty
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DM2
The gift of the Spirit in our hearts is the gift of deep belonging to the Love that lies underneath our awareness; that has been immersed in darkness most of our lives. ~Betty
The post DM2 appeared first on The Hidden Life Awakened.
December 27, 2018
December 28
Silence is God’s language, and it gently draws us to our depth. ~Betty
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December 25, 2018
December 26
Silence guards and nourishes the fire within our hearts. ~Betty
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