Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities. Isaiah 54:2-3
Sometimes, when it comes to a period of change, we can feel as if life will contract, but at those moments of challenge and change, we need to expand our horizons - to lengthen our chords, to stretch out our tents.
There is nothing more profound than taking a risk that encourages more of God’s creativity into your heart and a wider and bigger vision than you could dare to dream up on your own.
Life is forever changing and expanding. So too we must expand and change to grow things, to stop is to stagnate, rust and become redundant, we are called to grow even as we grow old. Aging looked at in this light is in itself “growth”. If we let age make us more fearless, press on to the goal ahead of us. In one sense we are then growing into a deeper belief of ourselves and our abilities and becoming more aware of what is truly important, this is the ‘growth’ of age. But if you do not expand - you do not stay still, you shrink.
The world is designed with expansion in mind – “go forth and multiply” is the first command “and inhabit the earth”. In Genesis, God tells his creatures to name and to nurture the animals and to tame the earth itself- subdue it’ - not let things simply take over. ‘Rewilding’ is wonderful, but also proportional, there is a beauty too in growing fruits to eat and planting and reaping the harvest which we celebrate at this time of year. There is the balance of the wild heart and the cultivated spirit.
St Francis of Assisi, whose Saint’s day we celebrated this past week, understood this. He was both a lover of the wild, of the beast and the forest, but he also had a deep understanding of the harmony that creating a food crop, or vineyard alongside a wildflower brings. It is the balance between the wild and the cultivated that helps us to flourish and grow. His monasteries always contained both elements. Life contains both discipline and freedom, it is how we learn and grow, it is how we enlarge our tent.
As God’s creatures we are encouraged to create, it is part of who we are. So today as you go about your work and life ask God, how can I be more creative - try something new? May be a walk you have not taken, writing something you have meant to do, be it a poem, a short story, or even a book. Perhaps drawing or painting, or simply making a beautiful meal from scratch, or even an interesting puzzle to solve, or a mathematical equation to do. We are all creatures and, in our own ways, creative. It is what makes us like the God who created us.
So perhaps ask God today to show you how to expand your horizons, how to stretch out your tent, even amidst the chaos and destruction we are seeing happening all around us in the world - in fact as a counter act - a defiant ‘yes’ to creation today - because this is against the destruction and thus broadening your own life and enlarging your place and space and so this can then be for all who enter in and…
…Be blessed!
Helen
Letting the light in…
Generosity, abundance, and plenty