Toppled books from bookshelves, over and over is her latest favorite game. Isn’t that what books on shelves are for—toppling?

And isn't my job to follow this little one year old around, as though on aimless repeat, placing books back, always somehow imagining that this time they will stay there for good?

Recently this game brought my old journals to the floor, like sprawled out years committed to paper and pen. And as I began to re-shelf them, one by one, a specific spiraled beauty—worn with age—brought me into its yellowed corners. What era of life spilled the heart into ink on these pages?

The handwriting betrayed the author, but words and thoughts inscribed felt hardly recognizable. Written nearly twenty years ago by a zealous teenage girl, sincere and so authentic, my ideas of the Lord and how He viewed me were so very different than now.

I was yet to know His heart of great kindness toward the sincere heart, still assuming His disappointment and my deserving of it. And I was yet to be unraveled by this kindness—that discovery that would transform me and leave me undone a thousand times over. And still does. And will do so forever (Eph. 2:7).

We're not to be casual about His kindness, we're to be wrecked by it... 

Click to Listen

[audio mp3="http://danacandler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Dana-Candler-Evaluations-of-Kindness.mp3"]