…You cannot create the journey. You can only accept Christ’s invitation, allowing him to be the axis around which all else revolves. – Judy Hougen, Transformed Into Fire

For years my mother’s knees have pressed into the carpet at the side of her bed. Hands folded and leaned against her forehead, lips rustling like leaves with whispered prayers.

Megan, contentment is what I ask for you, she says.

It’s not a simple task–to stir up satisfaction within yourself, I  think.
But I miss the most important part.

Watching my own hands, empty, but open, reach out,
to receive whatever life and sunlight I am given–this is acceptance, maybe contentment.

Joy itself the byproduct.

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“In all that great desert, there was not a single green thing growing, neither tree nor flower nor plant save here and there a patch of straggly grey cacti.

On the last morning she was walking near the tents and huts of the desert dwellers, when in a lonely corner behind a wall she came upon a little golden-yellow flower, growing all alone…. “What is your name, little flower, for I never saw one like you before?”

The tiny plant answered at once in a tone as golden as itself, “Behold me! My name is Acceptance-with-joy….

Somehow the answer of the little golden flower which grew all alone in the waste of the desert stole into her heart and echoed there faintly but sweetly, filling her with comfort. She said to herself, He has brought me here when I did not want to come for his own purpose. I, too, will look up into his face and say, ‘Behold me! I am thy little handmaiden Acceptance-with-Joy.’”—the charchter Much-Afriad in Hannah Hurnard’s  Hinds Feet On High Places