Hiding

Princess Morag recognised the issue that a fellow blogger wrote of last month: the phenomenon of people thinking you have your life altogether if you are thin and smile a lot.
http://momastery.com/blog/2012/01/19/telling-secrets

Smiling is Princess Morag's default polite face - it is her aim in all interactions with fellow human beings to try to help them feel more comfortable and flashing a smile is her normal strategy for this - it is not too difficult and it doesn't require touching the other person. Being thin is not part of Princess Morag's internal self-image but when she looks in the mirror she can understand that is what other people see. Pregnancy kind of messes up your internal self-image, way more than puberty ever did; where did enormous bump suddenly come from? And those boobs were massive for a while and then they shrunk :( It's a very confusing time when your body is invaded by two small humans in two consecutive years.

Anyway, Princess Morag wants to assure the world, as Glennon did, that being thin and smiling in NO WAY indicates that she has got everything together. There is no direct correlation between any body size/shape and level of happiness, it is just not that simple, but we like to think it maybe is because then we would be happy...if only....[insert your own condition]

Princess Morag is not UNhappy at being thin, but the reason she is thin is 2.5 years of breastfeeding and a smidgen of self-neglect. In fact she is pretty ambivalent about her body, not sure that she feels entirely at home in it. Sometimes she retreats so far into her body she feels like a bodyless baby in a shell with peepholes, and then she remembers that the people walking around her can only see the shell (so she smiles).

Princess Morag likes to think she is good at communication, and hopes one day that she might get trained to become a most excellent counsellor. But it was when she went to counselling herself she realised that eye contact is not always such a comfortable thing for her, letting people see who she is, that's a bit scary. And her body lets her know sometimes that it is not a shell, because it has muscles, that get sore and so her massage therapist is the other person who forces her to reveal herself and then release some of the pain that she has been carrying around, hiding in her shell, feeling small and unsure of herself.

dance shoes

Princess Morag has lost her dance shoes.  They might be in the multiple boxes that have been hibernating in the garage of the house in the new realm, or they might have been donated amongst many many things in the old realm.  Princess Morag is on a mission to discover the truth.  She needs the shoes because she is rehearsing to play a chorus part in 'Hello Dolly' and at rehearsal this week her slip-on shoe slipped off when doing a dance move and hit a fellow cast member (oops!)

The young maiden Kayley enjoys dancing also.  She has been admired the world over for her lack of inhibition in church, using her beautiful three year old body to worship the Lord during the singing of praise songs without any inhibition.  When she invited her mother to join her dancing in the aisles, Princess Morag was gripped by the fear of adulthood and could not bear the thought of everyone watching her despite the desire in her heart to copy her young daughter.

Princess Morag is reminded, through these events, of when she was a very young schoolgirl skipping round the dinner hall in her blue leotard and white dance skirt.  And her first and only dance performance as a beautiful colourful flower.  The joy of ballet lessons was unfortunately short-lived.  Impending open heart surgery required that particular extracurricular activity be given up, much to the young princess's dismay.  

Ten years later, the Princess took the matter into her own hands and enrolled her teenage self into modern dance lessons at which point she bought the shoes that are now somewhere in the garage or somewhere on the other side of the world!  At the same time as attempting to find the shoes, Princess Morag is trying to find her four year old self who skipped with a joyful heart and an eager desire to please.  She wants to tell her that she is brilliant, that she should keep dancing if it makes her happy and that not only will her earthly audience be delighted, so will her heavenly Father.

David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the LORD with all his might.  2Samuel 6.14  

God soup

Princess Morag was led towards a bit of a revelation the other Sunday at church.  Where is God?  The preacher asked, and it was very easy for the princess to nod in agreement when he said "God is everywhere".  But as he went on to point out, the words of our mouths and the beliefs in our minds are not necessarily heartfelt or demonstrated in our behaviour.   Princess Morag was asked to ponder whether praying to God was like a (long distance) telephone call, or a face to face - in the same room conversation.   If God is everywhere, then He is in the very space around us, and if He is just a breath away...

Well, what does that mean?  To Princess Morag it became a new way of looking at the world, if God fills all the space in the room she occupies then that means she lives in God soup - and that's pretty cool.  A morsel of Princess Morag in the broth of God.  A believer in Jesus to avoid the wrath of God :)