Screen Door

"... think about stories that you tell and the stories that others tell about you. It may help to think in terms of general categories ... Activity ... People ... Who has most impacted your life?"
—Dan Allender, To Be Told Workbook pg 10-11

Who has most impacted my life?
God.
Christ.
My husband.
My children.

When I got to my children, pages flowed into my journal. I began to describe how after living in major cities for more than a decade, we returned here, near the town where I grew up. People who knew me as a teen but were strangers to my children, would see my daughter and approach her to ask, "I went to school with ... are you her daughter?"

Those who saw something of me in my teenage daughter used my birth name and writing my birth name on the page of my journal opens a memory -- a time in my childhood, possibly 3rd or 4th grade, when I begin to imagine life as a grownup. I want to live in a house with a metal screen door, a screen door with an R at the center. Using another letter like an S or a W never enters the mind of the child me. She does not ponder marriage or other things she cannot see. The girl whose birth name is captured in the initials RR, simply sits and imagines her screen door. She does not ask God for more detail. She imagines and is content.

"Are your ears awake? Listen. Listen to the Wind Words,
the Spirit blowing through the churches.
I'll give the sacred manna to every conqueror;
I'll also give a clear, smooth stone
inscribed with your new name, your secret new name."
Revelation 2:17 MSG

photo by Nitkat