ON FRIENDSHIPS

I’ve been thinking about friendships and the shape they take in adulthood.

I’m trying to figure out how to describe the people I feel closest to even if we don’t live in the same state, not even the same coast. Despite the rabid miles that could drain the life out of a friendship, these people echo throughout my life as if they were in the next room.

It’s been said before, but we are not so separate from each other as we think. In all of our mundanity, there are others folding the laundry for the hundredth time, too. Doing the dishes, wondering what on earth to make for dinner, sitting at a desk finishing up a task at work, on and on. We are rocking our babies, loving our husbands, tidying up again, living our own lives, reaching out a hand across the distance to whisper, “hey, I see you, you aren’t alone.”

How to describe friendships like that?

The ones where you haven’t seen each other in years, but it’s like they never left?

The ones who deeply know you from the sister coast, state lines away, an occasional visit?

I feel their grief in my lungs, their joys like waking to the sun. How are they doing? How loud can I love them from so far away? Their love lands like a bird: the quick text message, the Christmas package wrapped in the most delicate blue ribbon, and after loss, the card and prayers like a candle in the night… all the ways we can say I’m thinking of you. I’m here for you.

As children, friendships are curated for us. Our parents’ friends and their children became our friends. That one family who joins the church suddenly become my best friends. Neighbors across the street. Pen pals and glittery gel pens, all the BFF’s scrawled at the bottom of notes. Our friends are mostly there because of proximity.

It’s when we become adults that we consider the idea of choosing friends for ourselves. Finding people who feel like home, who we consider family. It’s beautiful, the way people can instantly connect through similarities and find each other. How we can see someone and think, “I’d be friends with that person”.

But what happens when we change? When life inevitably gets busy and we aren’t able to offer ourselves up in the same way anymore? Or when grief strikes and the words come slow, when the very things that used to bind us together feel fragile and paper thin?

What happens then? Are we still able to offer up grace and understanding like we did when we were children? Can we still sit across from each other in all the discomfort and hold hands across the spaces between us? Or do we call it quits?

I’m quick to talk about how I don’t feel the need for community the way others do. I’m sure it’s partially personality, partially a deep, nameless ache that some friendships left on my heart, or the distinct feeling that I missed out on some very important guidebook on how normal people act. I often feel like an outsider peering into a strange land, feeling like an imposter, doing my best to master the accent, the subtleties of societal expectations, and just hoping I won’t get found out.

Despite this, I can’t shake the feeling I get when an old friend texts me and says, “I’ll be in the area, can we get together?”. It’s been years and we’ve barely spoken since then, but we go to the park just as it’s beginning to get dark, the stroller bouncing along loose gravel, our voices rising and falling as we catch each other up on what’s happened— the big things, the things that rest heavy on our shoulders, and the little in-betweens.

Or when a letter arrives on my doorstep that begins from last autumn and follows along months of life until spring. A window into a heart, friendship across miles.

I can’t shake what’s its like when grief cuts a cavern into a friend’s life and you can’t carry it for them, can’t lessen its weight, but you can show up again and again in tiny ways that will never feel sufficient. What it’s like to buoy someone’s frame even if just for a second, and how people have done that for me when I needed it most.

Our needs for community may differ, but we need people.

We need people to do life with, near and far, people to sacrifice for, ones who will face inconvenience just to show up at our door with a cup of coffee and a hug.

Friendship will look differently for different people, but whatever it is for you: that’s worth fighting for. That’s worth showing up for difficult conversations, embracing awkwardness, taking a deep breath when old pain reminds you of all the ways this could go wrong. Because what if it doesn’t?

We need people to be a reflection of God’s love when we ourselves lose sight. We need people to remind us of how far we’ve come. We need people to gently reveal our own gaps of knowledge, areas still under-construction, simply by how they live. And when our humanity collides with their own, we get the chance to hold up grace again and again, just like they’ve done for us.

Friendships as adults can feel like a labyrinth sometimes, an endless cycle of aligning schedules, fighting priorities, and the ebb and flow of life that changes us, but I’m learning that the hearts we call home are about much more than that.

What it comes down to, I think, is being in friendships who are also changing, who are also growing. It isn’t about being the same, but it is about the ones who hold space for proximity of heart, despite distance of body. People who see through all the layers we pile on and into the meaning of what we’re saying. People who know weariness. Who’ve sat where we are in their own experiences. Who are better than us. Who care about things. People who make us feel like we could curl up into the living room of their lives and sleep without fear of judgement, or needing an explanation. Who say, “come in, there’s more than enough room”.

We aren’t kids anymore. We probably no longer play with our neighbors or write letters in scrawling glittering gel pens (why did we stop?), but there’s something I hope we can rekindle from childhood: our ability to love just one more time, and the gift of being able to enjoy community with people who were perhaps nothing like us at all (because none of it mattered).

But this? Showing up in people’s lives and letting them show up for you? It will always be worth it.

“We’re all just walking each other home” / Ram Dass

WRITING FOR ONE

While Hazel sleeps, I’m opening this door just a little more for the words to sidle in like an abashed child. They’re all there, you know— while I wash the dishes, entire worlds being built, conversations I’ll never have on the tip of my tongue, word for word— it’s all there spinning away like goldfish in a bowl.

Sometimes I look at past selves and wonder where the words came from. A lot of it was the need to make sense of things. To put it down in a way that mattered, the way that it mattered inside my own chest. It was heavy and felt essential to get out. But now, the words pound with my pulse, every day, like breathing, like something you don’t ever think about until it becomes difficult.

It’s asking them into the light that I’m struggling with, these days.

What’s tricky is that there isn’t one specific time in my life I can point to where the silence descended from. But I think as you become an adult, we begin to see more than we did— how people view us, what people think, how our words could impact them, maybe already have. And the weight of that responsibility is crushing. At least, it was for me.

How can I write about something I’m still learning? Still growing in? How can I write about being a wife when I’ve only been one for 5 years? What about being a mother when I only have one child earthside, one heaven-flown? My experiences feels paper-thin, my hands empty and tucked sheepishly into pockets.

I’m realizing that I fear people are looking for easy judgements in my writing. Something pointing them towards where I’ve landed or who I am, or what my life looks like in the day to day. And where would I even begin to accurately capture every moment? I can’t, neither can you. Social media, writing, is a window, at best. A glimpse into moments of learning, failing, choosing joy. But the whole picture? Life is full of ebbs and flows, convictions and realizations. Momentary catastrophes followed by unreasonable goodness. It’s overthinking to a whole new extreme, because how do you capture that? I don’t think we were meant to.

But these pockets of grace, these things we can’t shake off…

With all that being said, I’m slowly finding my way back into this space. Longing to find a place where my words can land again. I’m making an agreement with myself to write about the things that feel important to me, the things I can’t stop thinking about, pointing to. Even if I’m afraid of getting it wrong. It’s all still there, even if these thoughts won’t be the same things that were on my heart five years ago, or even five minutes ago (here too, I have to remind myself that this is the truth of the moment).

And here’s the thing: if you were struggling with writing and told me that you felt like there was this massive responsibility to get it all right, that people were peering in from every angle, life experience, hurt, and story, and it all felt like too much to address, too many things to take into account, I’d tell you to stop writing for all of them.

Start writing for one.

Write for the one person who does need to hear your words. For the one who will leave encouraged, challenged, having a greater sense of appreciation for beauty, or community, or home life, or whatever it may be. And the best part? You can’t plan it. You can’t mine the world for the one heart who will need your words or plan how they will receive them. Your words aren’t for everyone, and that’s okay. All you can do is your part and show up, then open your palms and let the words fall where they will.

I keep coming back to this, something I’ve been circling around for years since the words started hiding in plain sight.

I think it’s time to be brave, again.

FROM WHERE WE’RE STANDING

I’ve felt an increasing uneasiness surrounding my creative work lately. There’s this piece that I’ve been searching for since I left the greenhouse that my college classes provided. The constant writing. The steady stream of thought. The applauding of individual work. This fierce bravery that I haven’t been able to reach again.

A big contributing factor has been this enticing pull to see what everyone else is up to: what are they doing? how are they reacting? what are they saying, thinking, feeling, seeing? I hadn’t realized it until now, but I was too scared to lean in and truly get to know myself. What it is that I’ve been given to see?

Dani Shapiro wrote, “It is the job of the writer to say, look at that. To point. To shine a light. But it isn’t that which is already bright and beckoning that needs our attentions. We develop our sensitivity—to use John Berger’s phrase, our “ways of seeing”—in order to bear witness to what is. Our tender hopes and dreams, our joy, frailty, grief, longing, desire— every human being is a landscape.”

It seems like creating is mostly about trusting oneself enough to capture the world in the way we see it: through the lens of our past and our experiences and our mistakes and what we’ve learned. It’s about bearing witness to what is directly in front of us.

And it’s true, maybe what I see isn’t what you see, and maybe that’s okay. Because if we try to see through the eyes of everybody else we’ll never fully know what we were meant to bear witness to. We’ll miss the beauty and the way it shapes us; or that all our suffering was not in vain. It’s also true that being honest with what we see is often met by resentment and discomfort, but I’m realizing that it’s only until our words find their home. Where they were meant to land all this time. Maybe it’s someone else’s bruised heart. Maybe it’s our own selves, our own liberation— a bird out of its cage, at last.

(There are more of us, see. There are always more. People who have known the darkness that you too, have known. Those who understand the terrifying bravery of speaking up, of saying, “this is what I see and isn’t it odd? Isn’t it beautiful?”. That’s the thing, isn’t it? We need each other. We need each other to open the door, to let us know it’s okay… it’s better out here.)

All we can do is talk about the view from where we’re standing—

Nothing Is Wasted

Over the winter, I got the words “nothing is wasted” tattooed on my arm.

I’ve spent so much time not talking about what matters because I’ve been too afraid of getting it wrong. Of saying something unhelpful, or revealing a part of myself that is still on-the-way, still shrouded by redemption’s beginnings.

But strangely enough, I have never felt more outside of my purpose than I did when I was deciding which parts of my heart to show and which ones to leave behind.

So, I’m dusting off the old blog to tell a story I should’ve told a long time ago.

For years, I was sitting in front of doctors getting multiple diagnoses, but seeing the same shake of the head. Always follow-ups, more tests, and more bleary ER visits in the middle of the night.

I had a stack of pain pills that my doctors would unwillingly hand out to the twenty-something who repeatedly showed up to the office with “pain management problems”. After a particularly bad attack, I was told: “Call a Neurosurgeon, we think you had a stroke.”

As anyone with a chronic illness knows, getting a solid diagnosis or even just a simple cause for all the pain feels like navigating a minefield.

One year into my marriage, I got my answer. It went like this: “Here’s a cure that helped some people, but not everyone.” “We don’t know enough about this to tell you if it will get better”. “Try these medications, we’ve seen good results”. “Have you thought of surgery?”.

My symptoms got better than they had been in years, but that pain… the one that shocked me awake and ripped through my body? The one that made me gasp for air as my husband rocked me back and forth choking back his own tears? It didn’t get better. Nothing touched it.

I’d wake up the next morning in a shell of a body, but around me, life would somehow have returned to normal. I couldn’t walk, but as my husband carried me around the house, there were the messages on my phone: invitations I’d need to cancel, friends that would feel hurt, and people who would wonder just how bad the pain really could be. Dishes piled up on the sink, work deadlines ticked away.

As I looked around, I’d feel that old ache settle heavily on my lungs: I was so very tired. My body was tired. I was tired of constantly fighting to get better only to hit another new low, a new setback. Tired of needing help to accomplish the most basic things. But mostly, I was so tired of deciding whether to keep quiet or to speak up for myself when someone questioned my pain.

Because a couple days would pass and my body would begin to recover from the attack. I’d go to my social engagements and smile as if nothing had happened. People would look at me and remark at how good I seemed. I’d nod, say my thanks. What was I supposed to say? “Hey guys, I thought I was going to die. Do you know what that feels like?”

Maybe I should’ve. And I would try, sometimes. Whispers of the attacks, mentions of my anxiety and depression, how small my world had become. Often, I was met with: “just calm down,” “it’s all in your head”, “my friend had it so much worse.”

I felt as though I must be going crazy, fighting wars and coming up for air with hands caked in blood, but to anyone looking in? Imperceptible. It felt like my hope had reached a dead end.

For years, I lived as if my body was the only one that felt as inhospitable as the Sahara Desert, as if I was the only one who didn’t know how to love something that had betrayed me so cruelly. I acted as though the mental illness I experienced was something to be ashamed of, to stuff in a box and pretend it didn’t exist.

I carried around resentment like an armor against all the people I’d tried to talk to, the ones who dismissed, or invalidated my pain: I used this against anyone who genuinely wanted to know. I thought that all my broken edges could never be used for anything good in a world that is…

…broken.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We live in a world that is fraying at the seams. Every day we show up with our patched-up lives and layers of trauma that no one will ever know the depths of. My story is just a fraction of the narratives being written out. If I walk around with my closed box and shame, I’m nudging them to do the same.

It didn’t matter how I’d gotten to this fake façade of a life, but I began to see that if I chose to stay there—in that resentment and fear of being invalidated—then I might be canceling out the purpose that all this suffering was gently offering me.

For the first time in a long while, I realized that I didn’t need anyone to validate my pain to make it real. I didn’t need to talk about my story in the hopes that someone would come alongside and give me a medal of bravery. I knew my darkness: my body was living, breathing evidence.

Once I freed myself from any outside expectations, I felt brave enough to speak. I realized that all this wasn’t a waste, and the darkness I was living through could be used to help someone else feel less alone.

I will never have the right words to talk about chronic and mental illness. All I can do is honestly shed light on my journey, and pray that it brings light to you too.

As I sit here, spring slowly waking up beneath a frigid earth, I’m still somewhere in the messy middle of all this. Years have passed, but my anxiety has still made my life, my circles, very small. I still hardly ever drive. I still wake up at night with my heart pounding, unable to locate what had frightened me so deeply. The list goes on.

At the beginning of the year, my husband and I found out we were pregnant. We were shocked. It was a miracle. With Endometriosis, the numbers are often stacked against you. But now, as my body prepares and nurtures this new life, it still bears the scars. It still remembers every attack.

Following our happy news, a dear friend asked me, “do you feel heaven rejoicing with you?”

I’ve thought about this a lot. Not just in heaven’s gentle song when goodness arises, but in the quiet company on the heavy days too. The days that break our heart. I picture Jesus standing over all the suffering, His father-heart aching at it all. I’ve always deeply felt that He mourns with us, that in the presence of our brokenness, He can’t help thinking that this isn’t how it was meant to be at all.

Life is such a strange blend of beauty and loss, a bittersweet dance of grace. I don’t know if there are always happy endings, in this life. Often with chronic or mental illness, there is only improvement, but not complete restoration. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m learning how to live in that not-quite. Learning how to look at my life and see all the beauty and growth it holds, even here, especially here.

I have been gifted a small circle of dear, dear friends who know and understand. My social life looks different than most, but it’s exactly what I need. Here, in the glow of being loved over state lines or from a few blocks away, I find my story shaping the words I use to speak to others. When I allow it, it softens my touch, lends an understanding ear when panic confuses and breaks. In situations I normally wouldn’t be able to speak into, I am able to connect.

I am not the same person I was before my illness and as time goes by, I’m realizing I wouldn’t want to be her again. I have tools and weapons now that I would’ve never had before. My heart is stronger, but softer too. I’ve been pulled apart, questioned everything I stood on, and rebuilt… what is left is living and tried.

These days, my shoulders feel lighter with the knowledge that redemption is God’s work. That even in something that could’ve destroyed me, I’m seeing such beauty come from the mess. I’ve realized that this wasn’t a dead end after all, but simply a new way of living filled with even more purpose.

RESTING PLACE

I’m still on the topic of home.

Years after writing a confusing memoir entirely devoted to stories of family, Germany, and this longing for some sort of permanence, I still find myself rummaging through my memories in hopes that I’ll uncover whatever it is I’ve been reaching for my whole life. It has been said that this desire for home stems from our eternal souls; their knowledge that this isn’t all there is. I believe that to be true, but I also don’t think that’s the whole story. Something must be said for our personal history shaping our longings and reachings.

All throughout my childhood, we were defined by movement. First, our immigration from Germany when I was a year old. Then, the cross-country treks… and within that space, there was one constant. My Oma and Opa’s yellow house in the same town where I was born, on that street, in that neighborhood surrounded by trees and a graveyard; by cobblestones and a field where it’s said that gypsies used to roam.

Year after year, we’d return to the same place, the same house, with the same people and a few new cousins. Oma’s roses would still be flourishing in the front yard, she’d still make Borscht as the first meal around the table, and question why I didn’t kneel before bed to say my prayers.

When my Oma was given the grave news that she had a rare form of cancer, we flew over and my world began to shift, to slip through my fingers in a dizzying sense that I had little time.

I wrote pages every day of conversations, places, and Oma’s own journey as her health declined. To this day, I think of her pressing ornaments, picture frames, and figurines into our hands as her last physical act of giving. She had nothing else, her body decaying.

I say this, because what happens when our constants change? When what we’ve known as a resting place is gutted of the very things that gave it life?

What happens when you drive away from the house that’s been with you since childhood, that Yellow House with the blue room and that guest bedroom downstairs that housed your mother’s wedding dress— what happens when the front stoop is empty? When no one is waving goodbye and the roses have become hedges and her paintings are no longer on the wall?

What happens when the rest of the world has moved on, but you are an ocean away and had no idea that the closest you ever came to home will never be the same?

I still don’t know.

I just know that when my husband and I bought our first house, the only thing I could think of was how much I needed to plant roses.

I just know whenever I make Borscht, I think of her and I hope she’s proud. I still long for the Yellow House, still dream of my time in the blue room overlooking the forest.

Most of all, I just know that it may be up to me to make a home. One worth missing, longing for. To stand on the stoop and wave goodbye. To nurture my plants and leave letters for my loved one’s to find in their day to day. To prepare food that is nourishing and have a table surrounded by conversation, honesty, and laughter.

Because if I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that it is rare and sacred to have something that splits your heart, that makes you feel like you can never be whole without it.

THE GAME WITH NO WINNER

From our second story window I can see nothing but the treetops keeping time with a breeze, and I feel it. And there, the birds chattering and laughing over some joyful news that I don’t yet know, but I can guess: the perfect place for a nest! A new feeder! Or maybe it’s even simpler than that. Something about a blue sky or last night’s sunset of overripe apricots. At any rate, I’m caught up in this worship of theirs and I feel it still.

I feel it again out on the country roads behind our house, past the winding hills, and down to the meadowlands and the woods that smell like woods should: damp earth, all those flowers, those flowers reaching up and up towards the sun. There isn’t another human in sight and it’s just the two of us with the windows down and he’s singing along to a song on the radio, but I’m just trying to catch my breath, to say, to whisper: these roads are healing me.

I’m shocked when I spill the words. They feel strange and I look up to catch his gaze. He smiles, because he’s known all along. He could see my limp a lot more clearly than I could.

And isn’t that how it goes? The way we don’t know we’re walking around with gaping wounds and a broken leg, we just know something hurts. We slink away from a dinner that we didn’t need to attend, we murmur “I’m just not feeling like myself”; we say “yes” to all the things we don’t need to, we minimize, call it a paper cut, and the whole time we’re bleeding out.

And we’re so afraid. That’s the worst of it. We’re afraid to look a little deeper. To admit to ourselves that something’s wrong, that we need a break, that we can’t attend, we can’t be present. We’re afraid to be someone who isn’t applauded, who has the possibility of being misunderstood because what if we end up alone or disliked?

So we choose the life of walking with a limp.

Or is it just me?

I’ve known something’s been wrong for months. Dare I say years? I’ve felt the dull ache gnaw and grow. I’ve known it in the way my words weren’t my own because I was too afraid to speak the truth. The way I choked over vulnerability and yet longed for honesty all in the same breath. I felt a knot in my stomach every time it came to write because my head became an endless stream of comments and opinions that were never mine to carry.

I was no longer that little girl with her two braids and giddy faith.

It’s strange, the way we can pick up identities. I’m drowning in clothes that aren’t my own and a smile that I can pick up on cue. I’ve memorized the language of those I care about, but all that caring is in the wrong place and without my consent, I became a player in a game that has no winner.

That game is called acceptance.

I like to think that I became a master at it. It’s one of those things you just need to observe for a while. You study the ones that are “in”. The loved ones, the ones who can do no evil in the sight of many, and definitely the respected in your field. You read up on every criticism and heaven forbid you do anything that would make someone think you aren’t fully committed to the game. Like, being honest or different.

And yet the longer you play, the deeper the wound grows. It festers in silence, in pretense and most of all, the home you grew up in, yourself, is a space you’re no longer comfortable digging around in. Because it’s a mess and there’s no room for imperfection here.

There’s all these rules, too. An impossible amount of rules. Don’t say this and please don’t dye your hair, it doesn’t look that good with your natural skin tone. Don’t create art that isn’t perfect because bad art is hard to understand. For goodness sake, pick a political side and fight for it until you’re blue in the face: questions are unwelcome. Don’t post so much. Don’t post so little. What are you wearing? Yellow was so last year. Why aren’t you more outgoing? Please let someone else speak for once. Oh, I see you’re writing about sadness again… gross. Anxiety? Boring.

And somewhere, in the midst of the noise and the people and your heart that so often feels too small to carry it all, there comes a whisper:

Stop! It isn’t worth it! This isn’t what you were made for!

Now, if you’re anything like me, you might try to get the voice to hush up. It’s too uncomfortable. It’s easier to keep charging on, full speed ahead, and try to win this game that other people seem so very good at.

Still, it grows. That whisper doesn’t stop. It isn’t afraid of your questions, your crippling self-doubt, or your bruised and battered heart that throws up a security perimeter if anyone gets too close. It isn’t scared of your stubbornness.

Maybe you try to drown it out. I did. It was too frightening to face, this idea of quitting the game, of cutting the ties, of letting myself be so imperfectly on-the-way. I couldn’t face the thought of disappointing people.

So, which smile should I put on today? How many pages should I write? How can I say this in a way that will please them, and them, and mostly, them? How can I be the perfect friend? The perfect wife? The writer of the next great American novel? An awe-inspiring Christian? How do I make those people love me?

When do I reach the level where I’m enough?

There, again, the whisper.

You are mine. I have called you by name.

And I think, in that moment, after you’ve been running for months or years, it’s really important to stop for a second. To stand in the face of everyone you want so desperately to please. The chatter, the questions, the sickening hurt and anxiety eating away at your soul. To stand there in the construction zone of your life and be revealed: all the messy, unfinished bits displayed. Maybe, even, to reintroduce yourself.

But maybe, that comes later.

Just stand in the face of it. Maybe you don’t recognize the layout of your house anymore, the curves and beat of your heart. That’s okay, there’s time. Maybe you don’t know what it is you like anymore, the thing your hands were made for before the game told you what tools you needed to survive. That’s okay, it’ll come.

All it takes, is a second of courage. To flick on the light and there, in the mess of all that we are, to not run away and face the voice we’ve been hearing all along.

Patched up humanity stitched together with grace, isn’t that us all?

I know that the game is intoxicating. You think if you could just tweak yourself a little more, put on that hat, wear that smile, then surely, surely you’ll win. If you just had enough time to master all the rules…

But you are not on this earth for applause that changes with the weather.

So, are you ready for the reintroduction? I am. It’s been years, but here I am. Hi… yes, hello! My name’s Amy. I still wear pigtails some days, by the way.

Oh yes, and I played the game well. At least I think I did, it’s hard to know with so many rules. But it didn’t change anything. It still didn’t connect me to people. It still made me feel isolated and distrusting. It didn’t make people love me more and God felt further away.

Anyway, that’s not the point.

Once you decide to hunt down that whisper, there’s a list of things you discover. Things like, how loud the voices are that have been shouting in your ear all this time. How angry they sound; not at you, but at themselves, at some wound they don’t even know they have.

You begin to realize that it’s entirely okay if the day looked nothing like you thought it would. If you spent more time pacing than creating, the anxious beat of your heart stiffening your body and mind. It’s okay, necessary even, to see it for what it is (a moment) and let it be just that.

Suddenly, a spark ignites in your heart. Who you were always meant to be steps into the room and you stand back in surprise. This Amy is bold and kind. She’s controversial and not always liked. She’s imperfect and often doesn’t say the right thing, and oh yes, she overthinks it too. She’s restless and impulsive, but also safe in the stillness. She’s afraid, but she isn’t afraid of them because she isn’t playing their game any longer.

Mostly, you begin to realize that your words weren’t meant to be theirs and vice versa. They are the echo of a tale that you lived through. Scars you’ve collected. Friendships that were alienated, and friendships that stayed. Your words are the stories that you’ve lived through and the quiet whisper that never ran, never wavered: with that, you arm yourself.

Nothing was wasted, see?

Isn’t that how our Father works? Isn’t that the process of redemption? I think of my time in the game and I want to mourn. It was wasted time, wasted energy, but I’m equipped with tools that I would’ve never otherwise had.

I know I make it sound perfectly wrapped and finished, but it’s not. You still get really afraid sometimes. Or at least, I do. I care what people think and I still feel the ache of not being enough sometimes. These words flow easily, but I know that I’ll have to rewrite them twenty times for it to even sink in. I really truly want to be loved and I still look in all the wrong places for it, but I’m learning.

I’m learning that in the stillness of the mornings, when I drop all pretenses and I let myself be honest in the face of a Father who doesn’t flinch, I feel it…

I feel like I’m coming home.

I do not need to be more than I am called to be. I do not need to be her, or them, or anyone else.

Open enough to be honest.

Confident enough to change my mind.

Willing to be wrong, to ask for forgiveness, to take a step back, to love and be loved, but always, always to know who I am.

I have called you by name, you are mine.

These are the things I ask of my heart.