Lori Harris: Blog

Where you are is a powerful place. Grabbing the tune of what is real and deciding to dance to the beat (whether you like it or not) roots you. It's called yielding. Yielding releases your grip, opens a path from heaven to earth. "You will receive power from on high..." to keep calm and carry on and operate in full strength. Once acceptance-with-joy takes the lead, you can change the places you're stepping and change the dance. But you have to be moving to change. Pretending things are not, or pretending things are when they're not, well, that just dissipates energy and confuses everything. It's hard to dance off beat, isn't it? And sticking your head in the sand keep you from dancing at all.

So dance with the partners you have. They are yours. Dance to the tune of your life, with its dips and sways, majors and minors, lifts and movements. It's yours; no one else has that song. You may like it, you may not, or you may only like some parts and really detest others...but [...]

Why am I so fascinated with India?

I've never been. I don't know anyone there. It started with food, but I am really that shallow? No, this runs deeper. For a year or so India--the people, the land, the systems, the needs, the rituals, the colors, the smells--the entire notion of India has come up again and again in my mind. Why? It's so weird it must be divine.

Today I met with a friend who was wearing a pretty shirt that reminded me of India--maybe because I was watching a history of India documentary film just before bed last night--and mentioned my obsession to her. She knows me well and just smiled. She's come in contact recently with a lady associated with Dalit Freedom Network (http://www.dalitnetwork.org)...and my name had already come up in their conversations. How could my friend have known of my private India-imaginations over here?

Yes, I want to see the palaces, walk the markets, breathe the spices, taste the cuisine. Yes, I want to take the most killer photos [...]

Well here it is March 13 and we've got three inches of snow on the ground. This weekend it was 65 and gorgeous. Sigh. Spring came for a moment, gave us a kiss, then whisked off again without a goodbye.

Like a good mommy, she'll always come back. In the meantime, I might as well put on my boots and have praise God in the snow.

I'm learning to trust that good times really always do come back. I'm learning to speak of them as if they're already here.

See, for six months I've had this cold in my throat that produces, for lack of a more delicate word, phlegm like glue that has made singing hard and not satisfying to me or anyone else. It lasted so long that I wondered and began to accept that this is how it will always be...never even considered going to the doctor or taking medicine to try and change my life. Sound familiar to anyone? Have you ever accepted your unacceptable plight without question because it came upon you slowly and took over your brain? There's a surefire way [...]

I haven't blogged since we have moved. Crazy times. Wonderful times! It has happened just as we hoped. We're country folk.

From start to finish, the details lined up like zipper teeth, and here we are in a whole new outfit. The old house sold to a lady down the street. The new house turned out to be the home of our dreams, built by people who loved quality where it counts, and passed on the blessing of sound construction to us. The weather held for our moving day: 45 and sunny on January 5, but snows have been coming down in record waves since we've been moved in. I've painted the bathroom and two bedrooms. All our art hangs on the wall. Not too many boxes remain unpacked, as necessity is the mother of using a box knife. The boxes that are still intact we obviously don't need, and I'm thinking of donating untouched. Less is more! It's my tendency to purge! I do so love seeing our stuff in this new environment. It's homey. It's home. It's done.

As we dreamed, so now we [...]

I've been thinking a lot about God's great and precious promises that I mentioned in yesterday's writing.

They give us everything we need for life and godliness, but they are not limited to what He wants me to do with my time on earth...or what you do with yours...because ultimately our time here will end and we'll still need life and godliness. So, in bible study today, I told the ladies of Open Range Fellowship of my blog and asked them to shout out some of God's promises that apply to life and godliness, then wrote furiously as they did.

"Well...they're every good thing there ever is..."

"Eternal life!"

"'I'll never leave you nor forsake you...'"

"We get to worship Him forever..."

"We could name off all the 'I will' statements. They're for us." (This from the teacher.)

"Deliverance!"

This from a soft voice up front: "No more pain, no more sadness, no more fear..."

"No more defeat...winning with Him..." (Victory, I nodded.)

My friend Sharon read aloud, "Ephesians 1:3--Praise [...]