incredible dance of being

Today it was BEAUTIFUL. I sat out in the screened in porch with ma Mama this evening and enjoyed the birds chirping and moderate temperature. We both were just doing our own thing but also engaged in conversation a bit as well. I read some more of The Shack (by William Young) tonight (definently recommend this book to whoever!) I wrote down a few pages full of quotes, now granted, my pages are on the smaller side, but still... I googled the synopsis...

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his "Great Sadness," Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.


Here is an excerpt from the book that I really find beautiful.

"What? You have never been disappointed in me?" Mack was trying hard to digest this.
"Never!" Papa stated emphatically. "what I do have is a constant and living expectancy in our relationship, and I give you an ability to respond to any situation and circumstance in which you find yourself. To the degree that you resort to expectations and responsibilities, to that degree you neither know me nor trust me."
"And," interjected Jesus, "to that degree you will live in fear."
"But," Mack wasn't convinced." But don't you want us to set priorities? you know: God first, then whatever, followed by whatever?"
"The trouble with living by priorities," Sarayu spoke, "is that it sees everything as a hierarchy, a pyramid, and you and I already had that conversation. If you put God at the top what does that really mean and how much is enough? How much time do you give me before you can go on about the rest of your day, the part that interests you so much more?"
Papa again interrupted. "You see Mackenzie, I don't just want a piece of you and a piece of your life. Even if you were able, which you are not, to give me the biggest piece, that is not what I want. I want all of you and all of every part of you and your day."
Jesus now spoke again. "Mack, I don't want to be first among a list of values; I want to be at the center of everthing. When I live in you, then together we can live through everything that happens to you. Rather than a pyramid, I can be the center of a mobile, where everything in you life- your friends, family, occupation, thoughts, activities- is connected to me but moves with the wind, in and out, back and forth, in an incredible dance of being."