Divine Opportunities

Do milk weeds grow where you live? Here in Indiana, in the mid- to late summer, milk weeds grow tall and brown and stalk-like, reaching toward the sky. They develop pods with a hard casing, large enough to fit in the palm of your hand. When I was little girl, I would sometimes walk to a friend's house through a field filled with milk weeds--the prickly exterior of the pods would catch on my shirt and hair as I made my way down the path. But late in the summer, something magical happened. The pods opened by some unseen force and inside revealed a beautiful white cotton--the bed of an angel, I imagined.

This summer seems to be a time of breaking apart for many people. Jobs have been lost, illnesses diagnosed, accidents experienced. Relationships are strained by stresses and the weight of the unknown future. Daily, faithfully we try to see and hear and know God, a little more, and then a little more. This morning I had a sense that this breaking apart is really an opening, like a milk pod, that comes when we're ready. Our circumstances break open--the illness, the job, the accident--and inside, we see that God is offering us an opportunity--to heal, to love more truly, to be free of circumstances that don't fit us, to remove every obstacle that gets in the way of our growing experience of him.

May we each be awake to every divine opportunity we are given today and cup each unexpected challenge gently in our hands, waiting patiently for God to open the pod of our circumstance and reveal his soft comfort and tender love within it.

Blessings on your day! :) k