I thank God for the day I learned about life under the waterfall! I have discovered that breakthrough is usually a process and I love to look back and see how the Lord has released me into a new freedom. I want to follow one of these threads that he has used to heal me from things that were holding me back, knowing that he wants to do this for all of us.
In October 2019 I attended a Waterfall retreat overseen by Angie but very much a group event. In a nutshell I ended up volunteering to be the ‘guinea pig’ for something called sand tray exercise. I won’t over-face you with detail except to say that I offered to do it because only 4 people attended and one of them was Angie. If I had known that everybody else would arrive late and be my audience, I can promise you I would have stayed on the back row!
Angie invited me to engage with a variety of small figures- some of people, others of things- and gently probed as I placed them in the sand tray, asking me lots of whys and whats. The pivotal moment came after I had picked up a house and buried it in the sand. Naturally she was curious as to why I'd done this and wondered aloud if I might like to uncover it. The strength of my refusal shocked me and, although I finally did remove it from the sand, it took real effort, pain and tears.
I wondered for a while afterwards what that house truly represented but nothing was clear so I parked it, as we do.
Now a quick rewind to Christmas 2018 , when my lovely husband surprised me with a gift of a voucher for a day retreat at a beautiful old chapel not far from home. At that time neither of us knew what the next few months held and, a year later and still grieving and exhausted by the loss of my mum, the voucher was still unused. Left to my own devices I think I would have let it lie in a drawer forever but gentle pressure was applied to convince me to use it and in February 2020 I made my plans.
Now I don’t know about you but when I am thinking about what to take to something like this my list could easily be summed up with-
I’ll take everything!
As far as I'm concerned you never know what you’ll feel like doing, reading, creating or even eating, so best to pack it all! Then Holy Spirit managed to get a word in-
Take a pot of dust Wendy.
He took me further in-
What about packing all your disappointments and not much else?
This hit the nail on my particular head. My plan had been to take enough to fill every moment; Jesus wanted me to have space to hear his agenda and to allow the real me room to surface and breathe again.
Disappointments? I’d had a few but I hadn’t aired them for a while and they were weighing me down. He knew that; I knew that, but only one of us saw just how crippling they were.
So I set off in early February with a small bag containing a few things that aren’t worth mentioning and a pot of dust which definitely is. During those next few hours I ended up listing all the disappointments that came quickly to mind, before- and this is key - adding those things that were more deeply buried. I covered a very large sheet of paper and cried at what I saw there. But I knew he didn’t want to leave me there, and I was so thankful to have learned about the waterfall of grace, mercy and love, so I went there and took all this stuff with me. It was then he told me to get out my pot. There I had what I came to call my Theophany of Dust as I scattered it in the ash -can near the fire while offering up every disappointment and trusting him to redeem all of it. In a moment of revelation he countered every disappointed feeling I had unwittingly carried for years and years with a scripture for each one that made me see everything differently.
He then took my hope from where it was suffocated with sand with just 3 words: -
Feed Your Creativity.
I left that chapel feeling light and smiled all the way home. And in the days that followed I realised how long I had starved the creative part of me, so when lockdown came and surprised us all I had already filled my cupboards with wool, paints, pen and paper, glue and possibility and in these barren months I was ready to create and to see my dust become something beautiful.
He wants us to uncover everything that stops us becoming fully ourselves. Angie could have lifted out that buried house for me but I had to choose for myself and that set in train a process of discovery. Is it over yet? Have I reached my destination? Oh no, and that’s the wonderful thing about this waterfall journey. It’s in the revealing and uncovering that we find there are other people who need a helping hand themselves and he always uses us to help them find the way too. Under the waterfall there’s always so much more than we expected!
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