BRAVE GIRL

I found it in one of my favorite shops today while waiting for my daughter.  It's a rare thing that catches my eye, my heart, my fancy, but there it was...just this simple acrylic drawing by Kelly Rae Roberts of a girl with a messy side-bun. (http://www.kellyraeroberts.blogspot.com/)  She had a sign written right over the top or her heart..."BRAVE GIRL". 

And have you ever received a love letter from God?

I kept coming to these keys last night.  2 A.M., 3 A.M., 4 A.M.  Finally decided that I was finished with this project.  Finished letting my life hang out there like clothes on the line, and all the terror that has meant for me.  Huge trust.  I prayed and asked God to release me, but He was silent, and I thought maybe that meant we were okay to quit this now.  I just let it go, and trusted an answer forth coming.

But when I saw the painting...I knew it was for me, and that it was from God.  It made me cry right there in the shop because He knows.  God knows how hard this is for me.  What it takes for someone like me to write this way.  And it was just so GOOD to hear from Him like that...

"BRAVE GIRL"


"My Father is always at His work to this very day, and I, too, am working. " John 5:17

Wendy says my name means BRAVE, COURAGEOUS, and VALIANT, and didn't we have a good laugh over that one!  A real piece of Jonah-work.  The hiding one.  The running woman, and why can't I just be invisible?  

But HE sees me, and HE says,  "BRAVE GIRL", and he writes it on my favorite brown-bag paper in black ink.  Pen and Paper.  My good friends all these years, and He opens my eyes to see all that is change since we started writing Freedom Journal.  How He does these great things in we who are scarred.  Scared.  He is a tender Father, and He keeps pulling His kids up and out of Egypt, and isn't He... lovely?

Our Big Papa is a God of change, and as I sat with my beautiful friend over coffee today, just spilling it ALL, letting it ALL come out into the light, I found myself smiling.  Sly little grin on the inside of this soul getting free.  Even in all the tearing down.  Even in those crushing breaks in this once damned life, and the holes in walls around a very tender heart. 

My Father is always at work, and that is worthy of my worship.  He is worthy.  And wouldn't you rather be a willing lump of clay in the hands of the Potter than anything else in all this world?    Wouldn't it be worth getting smashed down if you could get remade, rebuilt,...reborn?  Wouldn't you rather live your life right out loud?  And won't you consider being brave with us?  Won't you come and be one of us?

Brave Girls?

Bernadette