EMPOWERING WORDS

Whatever our traps, our inner prisons, our hopelessness, our gray, rigid lifestyles, our resigned, mediocre expectations, God longs to free us.  God longs for us to rise with fully spread, powerful wings, no longer helpless, cringing children, but renewed and bold, close to God's heart.

The summer I was twenty-one, I was leaving home for my first job two thousand miles away, in a western state where we had no friends.  I think back to my mother and how she must have felt as she helped me choose my suitcases and buy my ticket.  I think, with awed gratitude, how she did NOT offer to drive me there and to help me get settled.  I remember her expression when she learned there was no doctor or railroad or airport nearer than fifty miles from where I was to be located.  I saw her expression, but I also saw how she refrained from protest.  "Spread your beautiful wings, darling," were her releasing words as I boarded the train.

I have carried those empowering words of release in my heart ever since, especially when facing new adventure and feeling timidity and old habit holding me down.  It is God's voice.

-- Flora Slosson Wuellner in Prayer, Fear, and Our Powers, published by The Upper Room, Nashville, TN.   Used with permission.


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