SHE {Five-Minute Friday}

Today (okay, tonight) I’m linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker  for Five-Minute Friday. Each week, Lisa gives a one-word writing prompt and asks writers to set a timer and write, for “pure unedited love of the written word”. I must admit there are 9 children (age 10 and under) living in my home right now. So my five minutes happened a half minute at a time today…and I may have gone a few minutes over.  Please forgive. 🙂

Ready. Set. GO!

She wears purple and makes statements, and plants color with flowers each spring. She fills her home with brights, like her 9^th-grade locker stuffed with neon memories. She’s a little-kid-magnet, and longs for the day they will become her life’s work.

She loves and dreams and sings at the top of her lungs. She laughs loud and uncensored and drives in open air. She’s full of passion, and makes everything more fun. She’s in love with the idea of love, and you’ll never meet a truer friend.

But then there’s life. And it’s been real. And it’s been hard.

So now she works hard. Like she’s trying to make up for something.

Behind her, there’s a whirlwind trail–tries and fails, breaks and spills, and dream-crashes in her wake.

She hurts. It didn’t all work out.

Despite the hope she held onto, it didn’t all work out.

She’s not the only one. Oh, sometimes it feels that way. Sometimes it looks like things “worked out” for everybody else. But it didn’t work out for her, not the way she had hoped. She says she got what she deserved, and as soon as the words escape her, I think NO! That’s not the whole story.

I wonder if she grasps the way her Maker sees her.

He loves her to the cross and back.

This is difficult for a hurting girl to understand. She knows about grace, but just as quickly as she glimpses, does it slip from sight? Grace is this hard concept to hold, in a world where we all have to pay.

I want her to understand the way Jesus rejects performance—whether shiny or awful—and pursues heart.

The way He gently handles our ruins, and repairs broken walls.

That He washes over us, scoops up ashes, and forms them into beauty.

And not only for her, but for all the hurting girls.

STOP.