It happens often, as I sit with God, listen, pray, and write my heart out, that He gives me an outpouring of ideas, creative and poetic phrases, even songs. But it rarely stops there, because something inside of me urges me to give it all back to him.  When I do, I feel like a little boy doing cartwheels down a grassy slope. Pure joy! I literally feel Love sitting between myself and the gift expressed.  It’s what some artists might call a moment of inspiration.  I call it communion.

What special gift has God planted in you?  You can tell when it’s activated because as you’re doing it, joy drips like honey into your soul. It’s a God beautified and Jesus Sanctified expression of your true self.  Something He uses to help you delve into the mysteries of how profoundly whole, and creative He’s made you.  And how loved! This side of heaven, God allows us to walk into his design for our brief encounter with this world, and in these moments, we want to yell, “I feel most alive.”  “I am doing what God created me to do.”  “I am living out my calling.”  “I have discovered what I’m really good at!” 

These moments matter. We can feel the eyes of an approving Other watching and cheering and laughing to see how much we relish it. It happens as the artisan steps back to see genius in the stoke, or the potter, with the lightness of angels, touching the swirling mass. It’s the writer scaling the universe for just the right word, and when it comes, stepping back into time, to see a completed thought.  In these moments, the shades are pulled away, and we see how God takes us to a deeper place, to see love in its raw and contagious form.  

Love has a scent, but it’s not manufactured in perfume parlors of the world. It’s an odorless emitting of God’s presence and pleasure. We can’t bottle it, for its scent is a very small batch, made only for us.  It fuels the special connection we have with God, unique to anyone else.  We detect it most often when He lets us express the gifts, He has given us. Gift and Love, Love and gift. They intertwine for a cord too strong to break, and too stubborn to give up on us, even when life takes a sudden turn.  They can help sustain us when the light grows dim.

At this writing, a friend is fighting for her life after brain cancer surgery. Here is a woman who has had an international impact in the arena of prayer, who’s known for her vocabulary of God’s words, verses upon verses stored in her heart, that cascade from her soul in every meeting she’s in. Doctors retrieved 95% of the tumor; but it’s the worst kind of cancer, and will return.  There are seizures, possible blindness, paralysis wracking her body, yet her daughter’s report, “She is so strong, and has the most incredible faith in Jesus. She is handling all this with so much grace.”  Only God!  Only because she has discovered a unique gift to retain the words of God, and a calling to invite Christian mothers to a life of prayer for their children.  Gift and love.  Love and gift.  They are strong enough to carry the weight of tragic turns, they are what’s left when everything around us has fallen away.  This gift goes beyond calling, because it visits the homeland of love, and settles in the fertile valleys of joy. 

After all, isn’t this life?  A continuous germination of gifts passed through generations because God loves to sit with those who discover, receive, and express them.  When gift meets Gift Giver, the residue of joy lifts our eyes, and sends us out to touch others with a love that comes from divine communion.