"The more complicated life becomes,
the more we need to quiet our souls before God."
- EIisabeth Elliot

This season has been incredibly complicated and challenging. I've scaled back from this "platform" (and social media) to "quiet my soul" and am learning again to listen more closely, to worship with an audience of One, to trust and obey. I've returned to a song that I intended to finish years ago, but it seems it was always meant for this moment:
 
Mercy of the Shears is about how God's mercy toward us often comes through His careful and care-filled pruning shears on our hearts and lives. He loves us enough to remove the things that keep us from flourishing. He places us in hard conditions, strengthening us so our roots go deeper and our lives bear fruit. And here's the Good News: He grafted us into His family through Jesus (the True Vine) who bore the full weight of the Father's shears at the cross so that we may live and grow and flourish in Him!

"He is preparing us for what he is preparing FOR us. Our Heavenly Father knows to place us where we may learn lessons impossible to learn anywhere else. He has neither misplaced nor displaced us. He assigns and designs according to His inscrutable wisdom, always for our blessing and conformity to the image of Christ."

- Elisabeth Elliot, from Secure In The Everlasting Arms