holy & hidden

we all have our TV addictions. i have two right now {possibly three, but the jury is still out on Kings}. the number one show is LOST. i don't care how much they distort time/reality whatever-- i am going to be there until the end. my secondary addiction is another one i've had since the series began, Grey's Anatomy.

recently i happened upon season two of Grey's for a ridiculously low price, and was compelled to purchase it. since i do not have any sort of regular television {cable, satellite, old-fashioned rabbit ears} to watch, DVDs have become my entertainment. so over the past week, i've watched a fair bit of the show.

one episode has stuck out in my mind. a woman refused to have a risky operation to cure something wrong with her brain {tumor, aneurysm... something like that}, because her illness had woken both her and her marriage up. she said the for fifteen years she had been sleepwalking. her husband had his main focus on his job, and their relationship was a ghost. but since her illness, she had realized how much she loved life, her husband, and they'd been travelling and had fallen in love all over again. so, she didn't want the operation for fear that it might actually work, and they would return to their sad, sleeping state.

it really is too easy to live life in auto-pilot. to let one day meld into the next until weeks become nothing more than a pile of melted wax, one former candle indiscernible from another. why is it we need the big things {illness, death, tragedy, etc.} to make us realize that the life we are living is our ONLY life. these days, this day is the ONLY day. we don't get do-overs, and if we waste it, or worse yet, not even realize it's happening, that it's gone.

i believe that when Thoreau wrote, "I wanted to live deep and suck the marrow out of life," he had to have gotten it. he had to have understood our tendency to skim over the dailyness of life, writing it off as insignificant and unworthy of full attention.

all this leads me to one of my favorite Frederick Beuchner quotes, which i've quoted here before, and in all honesty, i will do again...

listen to your life. see it for the fathomless mystery that it is. in the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis allmoments are key moments, and life itself is grace. {F. Buechner}

may you search for and find the 'holy and hidden heart' of your life today...