Belief is the Life in Every Triumph
I can’t help but reflect on a day, not so long ago, when my spirit was all that held this life together for me.
Of course there are many times when I recount, with great joy and ease, the wonder of childhood. Walking hand in hand with my Granddaddy around the duck pond and how quickly he failed to retrieve me for all the laughter escaping his lungs while I stood chest high in a duck-dump, still brings joy to my heart, perhaps more today than it did back then. Many know I loved my Granddaddy and my Great Aunt Mary with all my heart and how that love has grown through the years even though they long passed from this life, leaving me with only their spirits to hold deep in my heart. Their spirits live on today through the telling of these short stories. Tales of how my Granddaddy let me paint anything and everything my heart desired, a brilliant blue and all while my Aunt Mary cursed every inch of the old oil paint as it would ‘most definitely leave a stain not even God himself could remove.’
Still, even in sharing the sheer delight these two precious souls brought to my life, my heart reflects to a time when a light most intense could not pierce the darkness in which I lived. Now some people may say it is not good to hold onto a past filled with sadness or fear. I am not sure I quite agree.
You see twenty years ago, while remembering these murky moments, I would collapse in tears as I still did not understand their purpose or how I would ever become anything but a soggy root buried beneath the slimy mud and the sediment of life.
Two and a half years ago Goliath (Terror) rose up in my land, pressing the grapes that hung delicately on this vine of life God had gifted me with. His intent laid out before me in a path of destruction and waste as a beast without God. Towering above all those who stood behind me, shaking his mighty fist in the air and laughing maniacally as the ground shook. That Goliath was a man listed on my birth certificate as my father but embedded in my life as a destroyer of peace, joy, love and the hope instilled in me as a five-year-old little girl holding my first ‘real’ Bible in my hands. The time for justice had finally arrived and it not only terrified him … it tormented the spirit of every person whose life he had ever touched. ‘What if everything we sacrificed, every moment we persevered and every ounce of faith that carried us through to this moment … lay as carnage in the great battle of good vs evil?”
Falling into a state of despair and dwelling there certainly would have been very easy. Even at forty-three-years-young I found the desire to run and hide undeniably tempting. Something happened though. Something within rose up and without the grand entrance afforded to Goliath. It was a silent rising, humble and yet indubitably powerful. Artfully it called on a lifetime of service, obedience, prayer, faith and the Holy Ghost. I would go so far as to say it was a sling shot of belief in each and every one of those stones that David so effortlessly flung and it didn't matter which stone he chose. It was the belief in which it was wielded that hit Goliath right in the center of his thinking.
You see, Goliath came forth from Gath. Gath in the Hebrew is defined as a great wine press. Golliath, whose height represents God's grace made of none effect ... imperfection and a man who does not know God. David however has a greater meaning. Ah, enter David. (daw-veed'), that loving token who is the son of a mortal and being one of eight siblings. Eight, the number of one who “abounds in strength”; “super-abounds” because seven is the number of completion and rest, eight is considered in the Hebrew as over and above this perfect completion and because it is seven plus one, it is representative of “regeneration”
… the beginning of a new era …
... and it was the wine press called Goliath, known in my life as a man who not only represented but inflicted a reign of terror upon four generations of my family. A wine-press that had just brought forth this perfect completion, this regeneration and the beginning of a new era in the life of Adrienne. Yielding wine from the fruits of God's spirit gifted to her in the form of many wonderful, loving and joyous memories and yet rooted beneath the murky waters.
It has been through the recollection of times unpleasant, however far in the past they lived, when revisited with the power and knowledge of who God is and how his Glory reigned over the trials in my life … this new era became known as “Legacy of the Lotus”.
