Connect: Five Minute Friday

Writing for the Five Minute Friday linkup tonight. Over at Kate Motaung's website, we have one word we write on for five minutes every Friday. You don't edit or scrutinize. You simply write and place your offering amongst the other ones, then read other posts and comment and create community. It's delightful!

Go.
"Connect"

Funny how my mind often works. When I see a word, I think of its antonym. Tonight, when thinking of writing on 'connect', I instead thought of 'disconnect'.

And, perhaps it's because I've been feeling disconnected and longing to connect again. Every Christian will go through seasons and cycles and I don't need to add to the beautiful writings out there to detail it for you. But in my current season, it's been easy to be busy and difficult to connect in real life.

I LOVE my Five Minute Friday community and even here, I have been able, at best, to only contribute twice a month, though I will read and comment on other posts that I follow.

In our small group, we are a landing point for new couples. We get them established, plugged in, they begin to serve, and then we have to let them go. It's a little difficult to always have new people that move forward, because we just want somebody steady sometimes. We used to have that, but God showed us that the group had become stagnant and newcomers didn't have the chance to break in and be a part, so we had to disconnect.

It was awful. All the couples we had weekly updates with were still meeting and we were in a new group with people we cared for but they'd all had many memories together without us. Now WE were the new people.

It made us more sensitive both how we received and how we extended fellowship.
Truly,  sometimes you need to disconnect before you can fully connect. This is also true in our daily lives. If our devotions become a mechanical routine, a mark on the checklist, then what connection have we truly made?

"But to walk justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God."
This is where connection happens. When we focus on three little things that are really quite large, and then God connects us to Himself in depths unfathomable.

Tears, anger, joy, these are all legitimate reactions. (Read the Psalms if you don't believe me)
He embraces you through all of them. For me it's been tears lately, when I haven't felt desert dry and parched for connection, I've been weeping through my time with Him. I've been growing. And I don't have a nice setting for that. It's ugly cry every time it's hard. It was hard to learn to walk, hard to learn to drive stick shift (I couldn't have the radio on or anyone talking. Oh man, my poor husband!) and through it all, those who love me stick by my noisy huffing and puffing as I work through it and get on the other side.

Thank you for connecting with me, even tonight. I am so blessed to have your eyes on these words, affirming that I'm not the only one who feels this way.

-Tammy
{P.S. Please leave your linkup # or your url so I can read and comment back for you!}