Something is moving in my life.

I could call it spring awakening, and perhaps that’s part of it. My outside world has been become broad and welcoming again, the snow replaced with soft brown grass and earth that gives beneath my rain boots. The landscape is damp with life and the promise that in another month or so, my backyard will look like this again.

I could also call it mental awakening. True confession: I used my birthday money to order books. It’s been a while since I felt this hungry for words, but suddenly, I can’t get enough. Consequently, my brain is on overtime, processing stories I’m can’t put down, ideas I don’t want to escape from. The one that’s had the biggest impact thus far is a title called Seven. Don’t read it unless you’re ready to confront the excess in your life HARDCORE.

These new ideas are dovetailing with things I learned from the Bible a long time ago, and I’m suddenly I find myself looking those old stories up in their entirety and spending more time sitting inside God’s words (thank you, biblegateway.com).

I feel strangely alive in the same way it feels before a giant thunderstorm, an unnamed current in the air and everything eerily quiet, waiting.

Something is afoot. And I wish I could tell you what it is.

The scary part is this: I don’t know.

I’m still praying, wrestling a few things out. (Read: arguing with God and trying to lose gracefully.)

But I think it involves a few things that are pretty far outside my physical comfort zone. One of them is a 40 day fast in solidarity with the poor. Don’t choke on your coffee. I’ll eat, but the foods I eat will be the same as the day to day foods the people in X country survive on. More on that later.

It also involves me digging deeper into the idea of who is poor and who isn’t, and what it means when Jesus says “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”

I might ask a few people to join me in an event to give away our extras and better outfit a local organization that’s doing some great work with women in transition.

I have the feeling all of this is going to involve spending my fringe hours at the computer, writing. It might also involve me reading the book The Fringe Hours to see just how that author went about using her time in such a way as to serve and honor everything she loved.

Best I can say is stay tuned. Keep your heart open. Pray for me if you think of it. And if anything I’m about to say in the next week or two makes sense, please feel free to chime in. Ask questions.

In the meantime, I’m stealing a new line from Linda, my friend and pastor’s wife of our church.

Carry on.