Tangled

Stephen is out of town and I am making Megan's homemade granola which should come with a warning label and an elasticated waistband, and finishing off an old fashioned before I get into bed with Donald Draper..on the Kindle of course. Having the kids on my own for such short amounts of time is always somewhat blissful. Not sure why, but it is. We do what we want, when we want. I clean the house and organize more because I can't relax when he isn't here so I have lots of nervous energy to make good use of. The girls play their extravagant pretend saga games and we typically have a time of true connection between the 3 of us (I will count Frankie once she can consistently say my name). This time has been no different. Of course round about 6pm my back is killing me and I am starting to be a bit shorter in my responses to requests for me to find a particular princess or fairy for the 68,953rd time today (why won't kids keep track of where they put things?! the house isn't that big folks..FOCUS). By the time I got them in bed tonight I was ready for bed myself but I had to sit down and tap out the craziness that has been my mind today. And by crazy of course I mean mind blowingly fantastic since it must have been to get me typing a post tonight after posting one last night.

Ever seen the movie Tangled ?

Well I have. I have seen it many times. It is in the girls collection and is probably my favorite of the "princess" genre. For the uninitiated it is the story of Rapunzel and if you don't know that story you better just Google it because that is so sad I can't even be bothered to link it to Wikipedia here. At any rate, this movie always makes me cry. Every.Single.Time. Baby Rapunzel is stolen away by the bad witch lady just after her first birthday and her parents are devastated. They search for her everywhere but she is not to be found. In her honor they send up a lantern on her birthday every year and everyone in the kingdom follows suit. The sky is filled with these floating lanterns every year on her birthday. Through a series of events, involving one "Flynn Rider"aka "Eugene", she is able to escape her tower and witness the floating lights for herself at long last. It was something she said right before the scene in the picture above that just cut me to the core. She is sitting looking worried in the boat that Eugene has acquired, and he asks if she is ok. She says that she is "terrified". That she has been waiting 18 years to see the floating lights.. and what if it's not everything she dreamed it would be? He responds that it will be and she says "And what if it is?". The movie then takes a pretty typical turn talking about dreams fulfilled and how to find the next one or something. Having watched the movie before my mind wandered after those initial statements, trying to figure out what had been so striking to me. I came to during the scenes in which she sees the lights begin to slowly fill the sky with their splendor. All I could think of was Christ. Christ in my life. How scared I was to really get a good look at what the gospel really is, what it really means. Putting those trite words to the test is a scary thing. Doubting is scary. Easier to sit back and hide the doubt behind perfunctory belief and religiosity. Digging into the gospel is terrifying. What if the more you read the more you doubt and the end result of your efforts finds you more confused than when you started. Where do you go from there? I have been there, and where I went next was simply to Him. What got me thinking today was the idea of the fear in fulfillment. There is fear in the fulfillment of the gospel in my life. What if it's real? What if it really, really is real? What will God do to me? What will He insist on teaching me? How will I suffer for Him? What is coming? How much refining will I go through? I am a person who has seen some refining. We all have. Each one of us feels our own journey has been almost more than we could bear. No one enjoys those seasons of life. Why run towards them? What if the gospel is everything we dreamed it would be? We sit with hearts and minds guarded, shut tight against the trivial pain that this world brings our way. And then we see it.. that first floating lantern of His glory. We can't take out eyes off of it. More are right behind that first and soon the music reaches it's crescendo and our cheeks are wet with tears watching the sky, ablaze with His Glory. His Glory that he longs to share with us. It floats all around us and through us. It is better than a Disney movie! The gospel is truth. A truth whose revelation we shouldn't fear. The light that He has unfolded before my eyes has been blinding. The glory that He has shared with our tiny family has been worthy of my many tears of gratitude. So I sit and wait. No longer timid. I know what this show looks like.