"Married to amazement" (Mary Oliver)

From:  http://www.aholyexperience.com/

What had Mary Oliver defiantly scratched down with an inked stick of her own?

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”

Everyone’s wild to stop feeling overwhelmed – but nobody ever wants everything to stop and be over.

Mama walks like that through the woods. Like she knows it’s going to be over someday, all over. That your face will come tight right up to it and there’s no stick you can fine anywhere to fight time off. Here will be over.

And then there’ll be that stark moment when you turn and see what you were married to. You can live your life as the bride married to Hurry, having affairs with Not Enough, Always Stress, and Easy Cynicism.

Yeah, I guess we all get to choose our own bedfellows.

Mama always said it and she didn’t care what anyone thought of it: God was her husband. And that ain’t just some metaphor to get the Pharisees all in a prudish knot – it’s brazen Scripture. Take it or go ahead and leave it. We all get to choose our own bedfellows – and who we’ll give our soul to, who or what will get our life.

Mama’s standing there, already decided.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement, vowed to Awe Himself, covenanted to Christ –and I took the whole of everything He gave in this gloried world into my open arms with thanks.

Because really? Anybody can be a cynic. Cynicism is laziness in every way.

The real heroes are the ones who never stop looking for the possibility of joy.

Grace is never passive. Grace is a hijacker. Grace hijacks the dark, hijacks the looming forests, hijacks the sins. Grace hijacks the impossible, the unlikely, the angry, the cynics, the doomed.

Your calling is radical: gloriously hijack every darkness with grace.

To love mercy and do justice and follow Christ means to be the Revolutionary Guerillas of Grace — radically turning the fallen world Upside Down.

There are always the quiet revolutionaries who give thanks for grace in the unexpected.

There are always the real revolutionaries who know this overthrows all the pressing dark.

There are, even now, the revolutionaries who know salvation is no cheap gift; they know what they were saved for. They choose to give glory with the breaths given. They choose to be married to amazement because only amazing grace divorces souls from the dark.