Monday, February 9, 2015

Keep

When I was in college, I remember driving to visit one of my best friends and watching her in a dance competition she was participating in. The dancing was beautiful, but what stuck out to me - and still does - is the song.

"This is what it means to be held
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive.

This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held."

This song by Natalie Grant, Held, is what comes to mind when I think about the concept of keeping. Keeping is something you do to an object, a person, an idea that is dear to you. If you were to ask me, there are far too many things that are kept around our house. We tend to be pack-rats. Slightly. You know, boxes of memories on every floor of the house, that kind of pack rat. Why do we keep these things? Because they are dear to us.

In the same way, when I heard this song by Natalie Grant, I realized we are kept by God and held by God for the same reason we keep anything we do - because we are dear to Him. We are his beloved, so he keeps us. He keeps us in the palm of his hand to be protected and guided and comforted and challenged and disciplined and grown and LOVED. He holds us, through the good and bad. He keeps us.

Our life has seasons of abundance and little. It has its ups and downs and its ebbs and flows. It is so easy to realize we are kept, held, in the middle of the times of abundance when we can very much feel God's hands around us. However, it's the times when we are broken, ugly, worthless and needing to be "thrown out" that God keeps us.

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**I'm going to start trying to participate in Five Minute Friday. This is a writing exercise where I am supposed to write for 5 minutes about the given topic. This is my first week, I'm already late since it's Monday, and I've been way distracted listening to my husband teach a theology class. So, please show me grace as I try to jog my writer's block !