A Kaleidoscope of Love

Courtney and the kids make notes for me to take along when I travel. In a card she made for my time in Brazil, Courtney glued scraps of paper together to represent a picture of a kaleidoscope. I thought it was cute and creative when I first read it.

Today, though, as I read it again in the Miami airport, it provided a good perspective. This morning I allowed discouragement and negative thinking to catch me by surprise in both airports (in Brazil and in Panama). I know I have a choice of how I respond - and I don’t want to use ‘being tired’ as an excuse. I started to listen to the thoughts of failure and feeling ‘no good’. I began to feel that my time in Brazil were ‘scraps’ of efforts - little, ugly, shapeless, mistakes.

As a way to counter these things, I asked people to pray, and I wrote some haiku.

Here are a couple of them:

Like walking in mud,

When discouragement takes hold;

Bright Wings, blow freshly.

//

So frustrating when

I let discouragement win;

Lord, deliver me.

I pulled out Courtney’s note in Miami to re-read it, and the art on the front gave me pause.

All these little scraps formed into beauty. A few minutes later, Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things” played on my playlist… “You make beautiful things out of dust. You make beautiful things out of us.”

My efforts weren’t wasteful or waste, rather I trust that God joins my scraps with the scraps and stories of others’ lives to make something beautiful beyond my imagination.

Next time discouragement and negative thinking try to get the jump on me, I need to breathe and remember the Kaleidoscope of God’s love.