Crooked

There is a painting on the wall across from where I'm sitting. My sister painted it, and it's beautiful. But it's also a dark and stormy scene, a sky full of grey clouds, the forest shadowed and dark.

It's also crooked.

It stays crooked because everybody in the house is too busy to stop and fix it. I feel too busy right now, even though I'm not. I think partly we're "too busy" because we've just plain gotten used to it.

My life is crooked too. Everything is off kilter. Askew, like the picture frame. I'm not where I "should" be. I'm not where I dreamed I'd be. I have been forced to re-evaluate everything I thought, believed, and felt. What is real? What is true? Which of the pictures in my life are worth trying to straighten out? Which of them need to be taken off the wall and put away, for a time, or for good?

But looking at that picture again, maybe it is of a storm passing. Maybe the clouds are about to disperse, the trees to find themselves bathed in sunlight.

The same things that are "crooked" in my life have proven to be good things. It's strange how often the hard or scary things in my life lately have quickly turned into positives. I can't explain it but I hope that it means the storm is passing, and that God is going around the house of my life, straightening frames, adjusting the pictures, ordering the disorder.