This fountain was given to Caryn and I by my mom and sis this spring. It's a nice addition to our entry. It sits by the sidewalk and welcomes visitors and those of us who live here with a gentle, refreshing sound of water falling from bowl to bowl.

But as I zoomed in and froze time a bit more, I noticed something...

CHAOS. All these water droplets flying in every direction. Some outside the bowl, some inside. What looked like these nice streams falling down in neat lines from bowl to bowl had been exposed as a bombardment of drops flying every which way.

And I feel like that when I get quiet. I feel stormy. I feel unorganized. I feel... messy. Chaotic. Questions fly up against ideas. Some of them go shooting off into outer space and leave me feeling pretty far off center. Other thoughts and concepts crash into each other and ignite arguments between my three worse critics: me, myself, and I (The most insane trio I can consult). But I still zoomed in more.

I saw falling. I saw danger. And looking inside I always become more and more aware of my own inabilities to be consistent. Good motives aren't enough to substantiate permanent change. And somtimes when I'm trying the hardest to zoom in, all I notice is the failures and the "falling". My mouth overflows and I spill ugly stuff. Or my emotions get the best of me and fall over the rim. But then I changed my perspective again and zoomed out a little.

All this chaos was actually beautiful in a way. There was a lot of action going on, but there was a process at work. There was motion. There was rhythm. Even though it was not a rhythm we are used to: a four beat pattern where we clap on 2 & 4. It was rhythm none-the-less. And now zooming in revealed something completely unexpected...

Beauty. Had I seen this image without starting where I did and taking it myself, I would not even know where it was from. To my eyes, it would be completely unrecognizable. But I love it. It has an oily texture, yet it's water. Parts of it look hard, even though they are actually liquid. There are drops of water frozen in the air, and pockets of air frozen beneath the water. There is shading that I could not create in any software. The more I look at this image the more beautiful it looks and the more I see.

And when we look at the inner journey of spiritual growth, we need to not freak out when it gets chaotic. We need to not lose our heads when we don't even recognize our feelings, or thoughts, or when our questions make everything look soupy. Instead, I want to see the beauty of the process.

These pictures are, after all, just those of a little fountain in our front yard. It's beautiful. Looking too close to it provides a new level of appreciation for it. But the metaphor stops there. In us, each of us, there is great potential. I am tempted to see only the chaos and miss the beauty. Or try and change something myself.

We are working with the Maker of our lives. We are living fountains. We don't have a pump recirculating water underneath through some secret system of tubes and channels. We have a Source. A Wellspring that gives us Fresh, Living Water. And the water is not supposed to stay in us. It's supposed to get spilled out into the world around us. That's the reason.

Let's not get distracted by the chaos. K?