Singing Orthodox Easter, through the Rear View Window

I feel my changes have been significant during this season.

And even if they had been small, I know that they have effected the world I share with others. This is so, because having a relationship with my environment, I cannot help but have some impact on it.

Even when the change is all on the inside, I change the world, because I give out a different message to the world, and so its answers to me change too.
Through even my tiniest efforts in clearing a space for God during the Lenten season (and clearing a space in my life to renew my commitment to program), I allow more of God's love to flow through me, into the world, contributing more to the world than I can comprehend.

Easter Morning, I celebrated that I had created clearing space to attend a writers' conference in my new home region. That was my Easter gift this year, and right on schedule too, for Orthodox Easter. 

I feel transformed by the wilderness I have explored and tamed this spring. I have found transformation in clearing chaos, and letting light into my creative life. 

Today, I launched a new writing work as a result of my spring insights and the commitment I made to launching two longer works. One will be an anthology of recovery stories from mental illness, which I will be editing; and at this conference I began my search for a publisher.

The other is a memoir of emotional/mental illness that I hope to complete a first draft of, by this time next year. 

I look at this Lenten season, and I am struck with how quickly my Higher Power has planted something good in the clearing space of my new life.  I know some of what I will experience will be painful, and some joyful.

There is freedom here, however.

Tonight I sang about some of this in our spring concert, in which we sang a lot of songs about the Arisen One, and nicely time too, for a Second Celebration of Easter!

We sang a beautiful round called, When Jesus Wept, which is easily found on U-tube...  and finished with some commissioned works by Josephanye Powell, which she led us in gospel style.  

It was a perfect Easter celebration for someone like myself, who is nearly always late!