How to Live a Lyrical Life

Today is Friday, and it seems like I’ve missed the week. I still have a fever but my energy is returning and my mind is more clear than it’s been in days.

I feel like I’ve crawled out from under a rock and I’m waking up to a world that didn’t slumber with me.

I debated with myself on Tuesday whether or not I should go in to work. The fever and chills and body aches couldn’t convince me to abandon my responsibilities, though reason did win out and I gave in to the rest my body so desperately needed. It’s a problem, I admit. I’m a rule keeper, a list follower, a pleaser of the worst sort.

And that’s why I need weeks like this one – where my body slows me down and I am forced to rest.

I don’t want to live married to a list, but having a grid seems safe, keeps me moving, makes me feel accomplished — or not.

But busyness isn’t the same as living, and sometimes I need weeks I can’t be busy so I remember what it feels to really live, even if living means being sick on the couch feeling helpless.

I read in Emily Freeman’s book that God created us to be the poiema of God. The poem of God.

“God calls you his workmanship, his poiema. What happens when God writes poetry?

We do. We happen.

We are walking poetry, the kind that moves, the kind who has hands and feet, the kind with mind and will and emotion. We are what happens when God expresses himself. … At the most basic level of our identity, your job and my job is to be a poem, the image bearers of God, made to reflect his glory. The art you and I were born to make is released out of the core of who we truly are, where our spirit is joined in union with the Spirit of God. Any movement coming from that place reflects the glory of God. This is our highest purpose and, ultimately, our greatest joy” (A Million Little Ways).

I read that and my spirit says yes! but my mind feels the tension and wonders out loud: how do we live a lyrical life?

We grasp for rules to hem us in and regulations to give us structure. And maybe that’s where the tension lies. Our God is a God of structure, but He is also a God of endless creativity, fluidity, and freedom. If He created us to be His poem, maybe we need to give ourself permission to live a beautiful life, not just race to complete a task sheet.

I can’t help but remember that in those secret places – behind the shoulds and coulds and woulds that we impose on ourselves and beneath the pressures and positions and proposals the world presses upon us, there is a still, small, gentle voice reminding us of who we are, of who we were created to be, reminding us that we. are. loved!

We are created and chosen and beloved.

Stripped down, moved away, below all the noise of the world, is the voice of the noise-Maker, the world-Creator who calls us to be His own.

While we might not break-up with a to-do list, maybe we need to evaluate where it controls us or threatens us or shames us into duty – use it as a tool, not a master and live a lyrical life. Live as the poiema of God.

I can’t get over that of all the things God did in His seven days of creation, He spent the entire seventh day resting! He who needs no slumber, who never sleeps, He rested and it was good. I don’t have words to write what that does in my soul, but there is in that thought, wonder and release and a reminder that God invites us to live and enjoy, all out of that restedness.

Maybe today, one way to that lyrical life, to live as the beautiful poem God wrote into existence is to give in, to surrender again to Him. How often I must remember that I am not in control, and I don’t need to be.

Quiet.

Listen.

You are created, chosen, and loved by the Creator, the King! United with Him in Christ in your inner being and free to live a lyrical life as you live loved and walk with the One who holds each today and every tomorrow and will never let you go.

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