Deep and Wide

I've been on a mini hiatus from my blog for the past week or so...do you go on hiatus or take a hiatus? Either way, my blog has been too quiet and needs reawakening.

It's hard knowing where to begin so I guess I'll go with my usual, which means diving in any old place, and hoping somehow the words make sense when I'm through.

It certainly seems like I should have a lot to say on this Monday morning, but the reality is I'm feeling quiet and reflective after a weekend away in one of my favorite places on earth. This was my third year to attend a reunion of summer camp staff, people who shared summers on a little plot of paradise in Northeast Maryland, sometime during the 1970's. I've written about camp on my blog before-here, here, and here if you're curious, but the one thing you should know about it is this-you never come away from camp empty.

In the past I've always taken gobs of pictures, but this year I decided to just be. To free myself of that small distraction and give my tired head and heart the rest I didn't realize I'd been needing. I soaked in the quiet beauty of a pinky orange sunset and sipped coffee from the comfort of a camp chair.  I saw with my own eyes instead of through a camera lens, the osprey soaring high across a sun drenched clear blue sky. I hushed the noise inside my head, and heard the sounds of a guitar strummed beneath the light of a silver circled moon. I took deep breaths and inhaled the crisp fresh fragrance of a summertime wood, a scent that never fails to carry me back to those magical summers of my youth.

Deep and Wide. It's an old familiar children's song, and one we used to sing with our campers. There were hand motions, and it was fun because the kids could be a little bit silly too, but also those words?  They meant something then, and they mean something still, and this weekend I remembered what that was.

God's love for each one of us is deep. So deep and so wide and so high that I can barely grasp the notion of it. I get caught up so easily in the busyness of life, and weighed down so quickly by the heaviness of life, and sometimes I just need to go back to summer camp. To retreat to a place where the enormity of His love for me is impossible to miss.

I can stand at the waters edge and see it.
Look up through a canopy of leafy green and feel it.
Sit under a blanket of stars He set in place and that He knows by name, and remember He knows mine too.

I can grow up and away and come back to this place.  I can sit on a wooden bench in a makeshift chapel in the woods and sing Amazing Grace...

...and be amazed anew.