Day Twenty-Two: The Beloved Life Has a Story to Tell

We’ve reached the last of our four themes in this month of Belovedness here at A Daily Portion. I have a little of that home stretch, coming around the last curve feeling. I can see the lights in the windows, the smoke drifting from the chimney. Because this is where it all comes together.  We’ve looked in the mirror and to the Scriptures and to the Maker to find the truth of our Beloved Identity. We’ve gazed into the Faces of the Beloved, the near and dear and the far and foreign, and recognized their treasured features and the spark in their eyes. We’ve embraced our homes as both evolving canvases to express our family’s belovedness and a safe place within which the beloved dwell.

But just as all our senses and sinew, brain, bone and muscle are wrapped in skin, all this is wrapped into a Beloved Life. Belovedness rightly understood and inhabited moves and breathes and makes and marks all aspects of life. For all our differences, our blessed diversity, what elements are common in the Beloved Life?

Today, simply put, the Beloved Life tells a story. Your story. It might be the best gift you have to give another, to tell them your story. All the passion and pain and glamor and gladness and monotony and glory and hard work, the disappointment and distress and transformation. All the walls you’ve scaled and the ones you’ve hidden behind, the lies you’ve told and the truths you’ve found. All of it, spilling messy and ugly and beautiful, hard and gracious and grateful.

Remember, you are beloved. These chapters and plot turns and characters did not earn your beloved status, and no page or passage can lose it for you. So you can tell the story of your beloved life. Some things might happen then. Someone else might get the encouragement and hope she needs to begin her next chapter. What you’ve done and prayed, what you’ve survived and failed and won and lost and given and received might be just what she needs to hear to glimpse that she could be beloved, too.  And for you? Well, in the telling, you might see Belovedness winking at you from some of the most shadowy corners of your own story, reminding you that you were beloved all along.

So tell it. Tell it and retell it and see  it more truly all the time, for what it really is: the story of your Beloved Life.

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