For the past few years, I’ve done something called an Annual Examen at the beginning of new year. This Examen (from http://www.unhurriedliving.com by Alan and Gem Fadling) asks thoughtful questions based on one of my favorite passages in Scripture: Isaiah 61. The following thoughts come from just one part of one of those questions.

Where have I sensed the beauty of God over the last year? Where have I witnessed the elegance of God’s hand at work in or around me?

For this, Lord, I come back again to Your provision. And call. I have always said that the Lord made it clear when we were to move to France and I trusted that He would make it clear when we were to move back.

And You did. Moving back into a beautiful home on a beautiful bit of land in a lovely subdivision in a beautiful part of the country. For this season. And I have felt such joy as I discover this beauty and the way You have given in such enormous and intricately personal ways to me. I like the word ‘elegance’. The elegance of God’s hand at work.

Continuing the image of an oak growing over decades, I think that none of the things that make this home so sweet would have been here in past decades. Grandmom’s furniture, Mamaw’s, Lacy’s grandmother’s. They were being used by another precious soul in past decades, and You were waiting for the time to bless us with these beauties in this decade, in this time when we could receive them with awe and delight and wonder. And it is that deeper splendor and elegance that I have felt. Not bigger is better, but God provides. God knows me, inside and out.

That is why I delight to show off this home—because You, dear Lord, provided the décor, and it shows in the warmth and the eclectic style that fits and invites and welcomes and surrounds and offers comfort on cozy sofas plucked from consignment stores and church bazaars.

And a yard where a redheaded woodpecker pecks furiously at a rotted tree and cardinals, a pair, come and pick through the birdseed, taking only the biggest ones, and tiny sparrows flit inside the birdhouse to find their treasures. Where squirrels hop happily through pine straw, or on the roof in front of my little writing desk. Or doves, two of them, coo sweetly to one another while I invent a love story.

Where have you seen ‘the elegance of God’s hand’ in your life this past year?