Musings

Republished from my blog From the Wilderness

I was sitting in front of my computer just now, hoping to write something, something, hopefully, poetic. The thought has been hovering around the edges of my brain that all I have been doing lately is posting other people's words and none, really, of my own. Even my devotional journal exhibits this same tendency at the moment. As a person who sets a lot of stock in self-expression and creativity--even if it is just in my interior monologue--I've been feeling cut off from my usual means of self-expression; I haven't felt the fire to write for some time (and by write I mean seriously write, not "just" journalistic-style entries). I haven't been writing prose, I haven't been writing poetry. I'm in the middle of a nasty flu/head cold thing that leaves me hardly able to talk, let alone sing--which I really wanted to do this morning and couldn't. I feel stopped up--literally and figuratively--as though I am hardly able to move through the mud I like to call my brain. I'm hoping that this mud will turn out to be fertile silt, but until it does, I feel unexpressed.

It struck me, however, that maybe sometimes we aren't meant to express ourselves. Perhaps sometimes we are meant to be silent, not speak for ourselves. Perhaps we serve a different function at these times, acting as echoes for other people's self-expression. We take in the efforts of others' creativity and reflect it out into the world again. We act as sound boards, resonators, amplifying the expressions of others. Perhaps, we, by taking in other people's art, make it bigger.

It made me wonder if maybe there are implications in this for our spiritual lives. Perhaps there are times, even seasons, where we act primarily as God's echoes, not His messengers. Perhaps the times when we feel stifled, confined, "hedged in," are the times when the expressions of the great Creator--His Word, His Love, His Everything--are reflected off our lives into the lives of others. And, maybe, the reason we do not see the ripples in the pond is because we are the stones thrown into the water.