I went to the city with a good friend to celebrate her years and after a day of shopping and coffee drinking and massages we headed back to our little town across the lake.  By then we were both full of caffeine and that shopping high I love so dearly.  By then we'd talked through our families, our bodies, the way afternoons kill us both and how hard it is to ditch sweatpants for real pants.  And we moved the conversation to a deeper place: we waded into our weathered relationships with our God and the new seasons we've found ourselves in.  She's a mama.  She's teaching her babies how to love a God they can't see, she's teaching them the language of prayer and the acts of praise.  I'm becoming more disciplined and I'm finding my heart again.  It feels like seeing an old friend after years of separation.  I'm returning to my first love.  And I'm fascinated with The Father.

When I pray, I pray to one of them: the Father or the Son or the Spirit.  I pray to The Father when I'm feeling lost and small.  The Son when I want someone to come alongside me.  The Spirit when I feel the sin creeping close.  But The Father is who changes most for me.  Always I am adding to Him.  When family dies, I add to Him.  When life doesn't feel right or enough, He shifts.  There's danger there.  There's real danger to the way I use life to define His essence.

The next day I sat through the sermon with husband and I opened to The Samuels.  I read David's last words about God's unfailing kindness and I stopped there at unfailing kindness.  My God is unfailingly kind.  The Father is unfailingly kind.  I have thought of God as good and as great and as holy but never have I thought of God as kind.  Kind is such an over the top action.  Kind is sweet almost.  Frivolously loving.

And I realized that I need to be adding to Him all of the time.  I need to be adding to Him so that when the hard times come they're not all I'm adding.  My God allows in-explainable grief to touch His people.  My God is unfailingly kind.  You see what happened there?  The Father just became larger than I knew He was.