FRODO: I can’t do this Sam.

SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?

SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

I am holding your brother as they carry your holy body into the church. His terrified heart thumps hard and loud against my arms and I can hear it above the wailing. There is no space to move here, a crowd weeps by the door, and I can’t hold back my tears thinking: you are so dearly loved. Hours later I am holding your best friend as you are being released into the ground. Your friends are all sweat and dirt for you, digging through the red soil with every inch of their strength beneath the scorching sun. There is nothing they wouldn’t do for you. We stand around you singing, unable to move.

It is too early for us to part ways; you are only 16.

**

It is 19:11 and I am beckoned by the vibrating device in my pocket. I take out my phone and read,

“I took pills. I dnt wnt to live anymre.”

The pounding in my ribcage cries louder, aches, and fear grips my already fragile heart.

“My mother never loved me,” she weeps, “my father never cared.”

The doctor walks into the room and asks me for his name. I say her obviously-feminine name. He glares at me with his eyebrows raised, asks in disgust, “she’s a girl?” I muster the strength to politely declare “yes,” but I look him in the eyes, with a look that speaks far louder than my words: how dare you be so ignorant. He looks at me and sees the color of my skin unlike the color of my dear friend’s, so he questions who I am, questions my presence with her here in the hospital. He asks for time alone with her. I turn to her, repeat his question out loud, knowing that the last place she ever wants to be is confined to a room with any man. I respectfully tell him “no sir, she’d like me to stay.”

She lies on the examination bed, he puts his stethoscope beneath her shirt to her chest and I watch as her chest starts heaving beneath his hand. Tears glide down my face, she is remembering the evil once done to her.

**

Who knew a heart could know so much heartache in the small space of 6months; from sickness to HIV, death, child suicide attempts, abuse, stoning, loss, grief, abandonment and pain. There is more in life than what we see and say, there is more that goes unheard and unspoken. There is so much more that is begging to come out into the light, if only we ask, if only we pay closer attention. As chasers of the light, we keep pushing to see and know the light, no matter how much darkness we discover in the world. Sometimes a series of heartaches leave us questioning, other times they grow in us resilience. Sometimes it only takes a moment to shake you to the very core; the light is no longer seen to shine, causing you to question everything you have ever known and believed.

**

It is February 14th 2017, I am awake on the other side of the Atlantic, waiting for my sister to leave the doctor’s office, confidently waiting to hear that her MRI is clear. My brother-in-law is driving them home, and I am trying to decipher her message – tumour- surgery-neurosurgeon – between my sobbing and devastation.

In a moment, immeasurable fear, uncertainty, grief.

In a moment, on another side of the Atlantic, my mother’s heart is breaking, and my father looks desperately for answers.

Surgery.

Radiation.

Days of appointments and tests turn to weeks and months.

Questions of

“Where were you when a 7-year old baby girl was raped?”

“Why did you take my friend’s life at 16?”

“Why did You allow a foreign mass inside my sister’s brain?”

“What of all the goodness I have always attributed to You?”

“Where are You now, God, where are You now?”

Emotional exhaustion, anger, disappointment.

When questioning everything, there comes a gaping hole in your heart, leaving you unable to recognise the face in the mirror. Sometimes if you walk out so far from the place you once called home, you even become unrecognisable to the ones who know you the most. With a heavy, stone-cold heart, struggling to process and accept every calamity, my choices led me further and further from what I have always known to be Truth.

Through the wrestling, months of giving God the cold shoulder and wandering so long not knowing my real name, there was always one constant; family, and the friends I call family, who even when I made worse than bad choices and caused collateral damage along my way, never stopped believing in who they know me to be. When my heart couldn’t bear a word or touch from God, He came softly and quietly through the close people around me.

And that was where He was all along.

Though grief and disappointment will never be easy roads to tread, there is precious love that is a mighty companion.

**

There is an ethereal creature that lives in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. It is no beauty to behold, but it’s wonder is in its resilience and ability to withstand the depth, darkness and pressure of the Mariana Trench. In a moment, all of life can change to darkness. Yet, in the exact same moments, there are ethereal snailfish who swim deep into the trench with us to withstand the same pressure and darkness.

Countless names and countless faces.

Courageous, tender hearts who are unafraid to share in the ache.

Relentless lovers and believers in the goodness in us.

“It’s not creation that’s the marvel, it’s the restoration to wholeness that is remarkable. That the destruction and ruin can be restored”
– Unknown

When I am in safety and strength, when I can look around me and breathe out with joy that “life is good,” does that heighten my belief that I am loved and protected by a God who is Almighty? Does that make me believe that He is infinitely good?

When I am in chaos, in the midst of fire and in storm, am I prone to believe that He is less merciful, less loving, less of Who I always thought He is?

I’d like to concede the latter to be false, but the evidence of my thoughts and actions beg to plead a different case.

Because a vulnerable 20-year old never deserved the abuse he endured.

A 7-year old girl should never know how it feels to be sexually abused.

No one should be burned alive in the place they call home.

A father, a brother, an uncle in Cleveland, should have sold his car peacefully without a gunshot wound leading to his death.

The news headlines should never need to report 13 deaths and 100 injuries in Barcelona.

And at 2am no one should ever hear that there is a foreign mass growing uninvited in their sister’s brain.

Yet these events and ones of even greater calamity continue on, and here we are, humanity in all our helplessness, left to fend for ourselves, left wounded and crying out to end all the earth shattering pain that surrounds us. And there are those of us who have sang every single hallelujah, who have been pushed further than our knees, face to the ground, wondering ‘how dare you God’ allow any of this to happen.

How dare you,

God.

Amidst the thousands of unanswered why’s, there is a man who is sick named Lazarus, the brother of a servant woman, Mary. Upon hearing of his deathly sickness, Christ should have ran to heal his ailing body, to wipe away his physical suffering and the emotional turbulence Mary and Martha were experiencing. But He didn’t.

“So, when He (Jesus) heard that he (Lazarus) was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was.”

John 11:6

He stayed a long and dragged out 4 days, allowing deaths grip to take hold of Lazarus’ weak body, and grief to sweep through his family like a storm.

Why didn’t He stop this?

Why didn’t He care?

Did the sacrifice of the weeping woman at his feet deserve such grief?

How dare you,

God.

The corpse was left rotting for 48hrs in the tomb, then “Jesus said to them (his disciples) plainly, “Lazarus is dead. And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, that you may believe. Nevertheless let us go to him.” John 11:14-15

What about Lazarus and Martha?

What about all their family and friends?

Was their suffering worth the belief of the 12 followers?

“Then, when Mary came where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.””

John 11:32

What about Mary’s sake?

“Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled. And He said, “Where have you laid him?”

They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.”

Jesus wept.”

John 11:33-35

Jesus wept.

Had he come earlier, would he not have spared himself and all of us the tears and the grief?

Jesus wept.

When I realise that too many questions will always remain unaccounted for, maybe those two words are enough to let all the questions remain unanswered. Maybe those two words are the only words that can really soften our hearts to a God who not only allows calamity, but weeps and grieves over it too. Because our alternative is resentment and anger; which I have found to be the heaviest loads to carry, too great for our fragile human hearts.

Maybe deeper than all our questions and pain, the soul cannot rid itself of a truth it bears; the presence and goodness of God. Maybe this is the real problem: the collision between the world’s realities and the Truth give birth to a frustration. A frustration of struggling to live in the the tension of the Truth that God is so good, yet so much calamity surrounds us.

In the tension, sometimes all there is to do, is to raise our hands in surrender, pleading with the Psalmist,

“Restore us, O God;
Cause Your face to shine,
And we shall be saved!”

Psalm 80:3

There are questions unanswered, there will be a million more.

Here’s to our fragile, questioning, human hearts, that are fighting to hope and believe in the glory (“This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” John 11:4)

No one can ever minimise your suffering.

God is good. Life can be hard.

Yet His wounds are not the end of anything..

With my sister’s recent brain tumor diagnosis, I have known suffering and I have known defeat. I have been on a journey of learning how to live between the suffering of Good Friday and the glorious Sunday ascension, to live between the tension; suffering but holding onto hope, believing that God is good but not denying the difficulty of this season. As humans, we don’t know how to live in the middle ground of conflicting thoughts or emotions. But I’ve been learning that we need not choose one side, but we can walk fully in the suffering and fully in the joy of the resurrection and the ascension. Hardship does not need to be downplayed, and joy doesn’t have to be faked.

Yet perhaps the greatest lesson of all has been the truth that great beauty exists amongst the chaos and trenches of life. I have seen how in the face of suffering we are not pushed further away from love, but closer. Because though we all taste loss and sorrow and death, they do not have the final say over us. When over 20 friends were sat alongside us, as my sister was in the operating room, I learnt that community wins. And when $78,220 is raised in 5 hours, I learnt that love wins. But we must all learn the art of taking hold of those hands that are close by that want to hold us; the hands that take us out for coffee on rainy days, long walks when we forget how to breathe, or the friend who listens and holds you when there is nothing left to be said. We must accept that sometimes in life, we do need to hold our hands with others, that we need help. There is always love and hands reaching out, we must learn how to say yes and accept that love.

So even when the flood rises, there is always the beauty of the rainbow to remind us that no calamity will ever overtake us, that we will not perish. Our rainbow is glorious, made of countless faces and names, reminding us that love always wins.

To those suffering and in the trenches – you are never alone. Don’t be afraid to ask for help
There is always love.

And love wins.

I retell the story once written of a woman caught in her weakness. A tale of piercing words and stones clenched in fists. Yet, there is a Man who bends low, speaks:

“He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” John 8:7

Stones fall like rain to the ground, every voice is silenced. My sweet sister falls too to the ground, and Mama says, “the Word has pierced her, she is humbling herself.”

“Neither do I accuse you, go and sin no more.” John 8:11

Sister wipes her tears in her shirt, cries,

“But I can’t change. I sleep with so many men. I’m 30 and I can’t have one man. My Father and mother don’t believe I can change, they call me a drunkard. So I just drink.”

We hold her close, speak softly: “we are your family, and we believe in you.”

“Really?” She stares at us, wide-eyed, in disbelief. “But how can I change, I drink. I don’t know how.”

“His power is your strength.

You are worthy.

You are loved.”

Wise Mama speaks to her of Paul on the road to Damascus, tells her the truth that no one is ever too far from grace, that there is no such thing as a lost cause.

“Nifuna, Nifuna, Nifuna” (I want, I want, I want), she pleads.

We hold hands in prayer, pleading for every chain and stronghold to break.

I marvel at the God who does not count our sin, only the number of hairs on our head. I marvel at the abundance of that love.

Sometimes those who are serving God become the hopeless, wishing that those whom they serve could change, but lacking the belief that they can actually change. Perhaps most people, if not all, have a list of “lost causes.” But maybe there is power in the faith of friends who believe in His power. Maybe hope for the hopeless starts right here, with us, when we pursue the wholeness of others by believing in the wholeness of others. Maybe our belief is everything; maybe our faith is more potent than we ever imagined. Like the paralytic man who’s healing came when his friends insisted to lay him before Christ.

When He saw their faith, He said to him, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” Luke 5:20

Because a roof was no hindrance when the “power of the Lord was present to heal them.” (Luke 5:17) Maybe breaking rooftops is our call, and maybe the hardest rooftop to break through is our own disbelief. What if hope for the hopeless looks like a man weeping and praying in faith before a holy God on behalf of an unfaithful nation (Ezra 9), until the power of God is displayed through their repentance (Ezra 10)?

What if those around us, who are in need of change, never changed because we never faithfully believed and prayed that they could?

What if we prayed for others, genuinely believing in Gods power?

Sweet sister comes the next evening for prayers, runs up to the altar weeping on her knees. Maybe our faith in Him on behalf of others is the most we really have to offer, maybe He is more powerful than we have ever known…

in·tol·er·ant \-rənt\ ; not willing to allow or accept something

There is much talk of guns and hate, terror and injustice. Religious belief systems are in question, and humanities morality appears to be in severe decline.

We hate the guns, those behind the guns, and those who refuse to stop the guns. We hate the terror, the terrorists and the beliefs that drive them to acts of violence. We hate the violence and the violent, the injustice and the obstructers of peace. We hate the intolerance that leads to hate.

And amidst it all she tears into me as I hear her say, “it is this hate that makes some of us still hide.”

I remember every persecuted minority.

Humans were not made for this kind of hate; we were not made to hide.

I can’t help but think of all those who are more fearful, more hateful of themselves because of this. And I can’t help but wonder what possesses a human to unflinchingly rob someone of life for holding different beliefs. Maybe we don’t have guns pointed, but what difference does it make when in our own hearts we possess the same intolerance towards various people who are different to us?

There is no measure to intolerance – there is only willingness or unwillingness to allow or accept another person for their beliefs.

There are those who call it a higher power, God, Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Selassie, mother nature, or science. There are the singers, the dancers, the poets and the drummers, who envision a different meaning to the word worship. There are the Sunni’s, the Shi’ite’s, the Sufi’s and the Baha’is. The evangelicals, Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, the Orthodox and all those who refuse to go by a name. There are the liberal and the fundamentalists. There is creation, and there is evolution. There are homosexuals, heterosexuals, transgender, bisexuals. There are those whose birth determined their hair, skin color and the shape of their eyes. And there are those who like guns, love guns, believe in the right to a gun, and there are those who have known the searing loss caused by a gun.

We live in a world of diversity, and diversity should neither threaten nor scare us. Diversity was never made to cause this kind of chaos.

But maybe amidst the chaos and the ache we can all fight for something. Maybe we can fight the intolerance in our own hearts and refuse to let the same darkness take hold of us. Maybe we can fight the pride of being offended when others don’t agree with us, and forsake the supremacy of our own thoughts. Because intolerance is pride. Intolerance is believing that our own beliefs make us greater than others. Intolerance is the unspoken disgust, disdain and disregard of another person because of what they believe or how they choose to live their life.

Maybe instead of pointing the gun we can reach out our hands to understand one another better.

Maybe instead of slashing others with the sword at the tip of our tongues we let kind words make a warm home between us.

It is time to consider what makes us pull the trigger.

It is time to disarm.

It is time to stop hating.

It is time to walk in love.

We all belong to each other. That is plenty, that is enough.

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
– Mother Theresa

Photo courtesy of Maria Dryfhout

And that’s okay.

I hear you.
The weary heart that is tired of all the voices telling you to just “get over it already.”
The disheartened heart that wonders if she can ever love anyone as much as she loved him.
The broken heart that mourns the loss of years of friendship.
And you, who keeps telling yourself “not this” – that it’s been way too long for you to still feel this way.
I hear you.

I guess as humans we naturally progress, and we always want to move on. We want to come to a place of learning how to breath like we used to, without that other person. Arriving at the place where we no longer care, at least that’s what we’re made to think. We’re told that to move on is to stop loving, stop caring, and enjoy that all ties have been severed.

The truth is, you cannot drain an ocean and when you have loved deeply, you cannot one day wake up and unlove. Whether a relationship or a friendship, when another’s name has been etched into our heart, our world is changed because of them, especially when we have discovered parts of ourselves through them.

Human connection is one of the most fundamental cravings and perhaps that is why it is unerasable. Perhaps that is why, like tree roots in barren soil, we take the mould of those whose lives are mingled with ours. Perhaps that is why even after countless months of silence, speaking to them again is like finding a place you forgot existed; like travelling for so long and realising they are home, with the same scent and laugh as they had all that time ago. A place with the front porch light on and an open door, greeted by a smile that still remembers exactly what to say and how to say it. A coffee cup with your name on it, coffee poured just the way you’ve always liked it. Home. Connection. Belonging. And it’s like you never left. And maybe the truth is, you haven’t. Because they are a place where you will always feel known and seen for all that you are.

And that’s okay.

Maybe moving on looks more like making space for the complexity of those “it shouldn’t be like this” torrents of missing them and learning that we don’t need to act on what we feel no matter how potent our desire or longing is. Sometimes every inch in our body bemoans and laments strong feelings for someone and having to silence it. So don’t silence it: write about it, pray about it, sing about it but know when it’s time to put the pen down and walk away. Peace is found when we allow the paradox to be just exactly as it is. Sometimes we expect total clarity with zero doubt, believing it to be an indication that we should stay in a relationship or go back when perfect resolution isn’t there. But that is deceptive, perfectionistic and not very self-compassionate. Then there are the times you realise love isn’t enough and you have to do hard things like leaving.

In the end remind yourself, that just because the space their love left is still hollow, it isn’t a sign that your lives must be intertwined. That means learning to let go of control and living in the tension – wanting but not having, missing but not making what you miss a reality. Our feelings should not surprise or scare us – they are but a glorious, devastating testament to the sheer power of connection.

So what does it mean to move on? I guess that looks different for everyone. For some people it may mean deleting their number or unfriending them on Facebook, for another person it may mean choosing to stop asking about them and for another it may mean going to the places that remind you most of them but making new memories there. Disconnecting the connection is a road overgrown and we must all learn how to travel down it.

Maybe moving on doesn’t look like waiting for change, hoping for that ‘I was wrong’ apology or the day they come back fighting for you. Maybe moving on will never just happen with time. Letting them go is letting go of more than memories and the photographs painted on the inside of your mind. It is letting go of the safety of arms you carved into your own, the sweet dispositions and wide-eyed gazes that only you knew the meaning of and the connection that echoed the largeness of life. Moving on is the daily choice to not carry that love, or loss or that person as your identity.

Maybe moving on isn’t about unloving, and moving on in this way can sound dangerous and feels like losing. But maybe moving on in this way is the bravest thing we can do: to not fear admitting how much love still remains, yet not pursuing that love anymore. Maybe moving on looks a lot like courage; believing that there is a greater cause to live by than our fears.

Maybe moving on is choosing not to shape the memories into our bones – not to live in the past, not to relive the past. Choosing ‘now.’ Choosing to surround yourself with those who can love you well, to remind you that all love is not lost because love is not that person.

And we’ll be okay.

“To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name,
and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone,
it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.”

– Nicole Krauss

Co-written with Sandra.

Friend, it is okay. Christ’s love for you does not change whether you have taken an entire week’s leave, or whether your every day is tightly packed. All earth is holy ground, and maybe within your office, your patient or that important exam, lies holiness, maybe therein is the washing of feet.

There is no sacred-secular divide; wherever you are, what will your journey be this Holy Week?

“Wherever you are, be all there” –Jim Elliot

And there’s a seam in my heart, one I trace back to spending hours pouring my soul over, needle to thread, weaving through all the truths I believed I must live, and all the expectations that would keep my life neat, keep it tidy. Because who longs to live a messy life displaying only rugged edges and pulled out threads all over? Yet with every stitch, it feels like I closed the hollow in my ears, unable to hear, sealed the passion burrowing in me, unable to live. For to be fully alive, is to be wholly attentive to the Voice that calls you into being, and to allow the flame inside you to burn as fierce and as loud as the Voice.

There is a song bottled in the heart, a beautiful symphony that awakens the soul to live out audaciously. We stifle the lyrics through finance-focused careers, pleasing those around us and masking who we are that we may be accepted. Yet every Word calls for embracing the unknown, to live day by day, uncalculated, unplanned, radically obedient. And in that radical obedience, a radical defiance to all the suppose-to-do and the should-do’s, shaking off every expectation we claimed as our own.

In our desperation to stitch our frayed seams to picture perfection we neglect the tell tale signs of the thread as it pierces our fabric. So when there comes a day when the thread snaps and the material wears thin from carrying a weight it was never meant to bear, what will the mark the needle left tell? There is the thread I stitch with, the thread of performance, perfectionism, scarcity and of comparison. The thread of lies, insecurities and of living for the applause that never seems to arrive. The thread that tightens and holds the fabric is the very thread that tangles us into an insolvable knot.

There is an otherworldly thread. This thread like the ECG on a monitor is the thread that does not tie but flows, as a steady thrum of a heartbeat bursting from our chest, chasing the truth planted in our hearts and  bursting the seams of what is ordinary or expected. This thread is the thread of no seams, no limits, no bounds, no man made edges. This thread does not try to tuck in the chaos inside our world of sadness neatly away. Chaos is with the fabric, every fabric you’ll find it embedded in the fibres; otherworldly fibres that connect our spirit to the Spirit of God. For it is His Kingdom that lies within. It is His Kingdom that fills.

Sometimes my heart aches; am I really free? Do I live free or do I live confined to social and cultural expectations? Perhaps even my very own expectations. Often the well beaten path seems like the only option, when your feet are unsteady and choices seem heavy. But maybe all it takes is to open up your eyes and look beyond these sheltered gardens to see  there is a whole forest out there beckoning you to explore its acres.

I’m beginning to understand that God has given us our passions for a reason. They are chosen and they are precious. We are not meant to be smoldered. Smoldered, by the piles of to do lists and meaningless business, obligations and “should dos”. Because what if there really is no “should” in life? Could the words of Esther, “Perhaps this is the moment for which I have been created” (Esther 4:14) hold true in each and every moment?

I believe we are made for adventure; we are made for more.

May we live zealously with purpose, realizing that every choice is a stroke of paint in the picture He is painting of our lives.

May we stop living as prisoners of all the should-do’s.

May we choose to stop calculating our every step.

May we allow the melody to rise, that we may unashamedly burst at the seams.

Co-written with Monica

(Photo courtesy of Mykola Lunov)

“I would fold
a thousand paper cranes
for you,
would fight away all those demons
that leave scratches over your skin
just so you know
that they don’t always leave through
bloody trails.

I look at you and see all the ways
a soul can bruise, and I wish
I could sink my hands into your flesh
and light lanterns along your spine
so you know that there’s nothing
but light
when I see you.

Listen.

When the wind blows
all your candles out, when the stars
turn to plumes of smoke,
when your mother makes you watch
as the matches burn out in her eyes,
Let me hold your hand, your skin,
the stones you’ve swallowed in your sleep.
Let me
slip your soul out of your skin
so you can sleep in my palms
for tonight.”

– Shinji Moon

Trust is a fragile thing. It is easily trampled under foot, until the microscopic shards leave you ripped and bleeding.

Trust is placed in many places and many faces. It may be placed in godly leaders in our lives. We trust their words and leadership. When we trust we often look to them as if that they are the Church, and when trust is broken, all their words come into question. But reality tells us that men are all fallible and the Church is more than its leadership, it is Christ’s flesh and bones, it is the teaching once delivered to the saints. Trust cannot alone be put in godly men and women around us. Trust must be primarily in God, who is infallible, who is our Truth.

But what is our Truth?

Where are we and what do we believe?

In what teaching do we trust, to what Truth do we hold on to?

Our allegiance is not to men and women who teach, but it is to the Word, the only Word that is Truth.

It is not uncommon to bite the hand that feeds us. Truth may feed us for some time, while later, in our pride, we may become our own truth. I recently discovered that I was master of my own ship; was once taught how to sail, then later made up my own way to tread through many waters.

I have seen war, and I have heard rumors of war between leaders amongst the churches. I don’t know politics, but Church is the politics I have been forced to learn. Church is the place I have hurt from, and I have hated, countless times to remember. It is in this place I have witnessed unforgiveness, injustice and anything but grace.

Yet the Church is home to the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Truth. The Truth that outshines any darkness. And in that Truth I realize, it is man whom I have hurt from, I have hated, and I have witnessed unforgettable sights. All the while the Church stood firm, rooted in the teachings it has held for centuries. But often, as a response to my own hurt and frustration, I not only reject the perpetrators, but I reject too the teachings the Church is founded on, as if this will be the soothing ointment to my wounds. Bitterness has never healed a wounded heart, and rejection of Truth only leads us further from the Truth. Out of hurt, it is easy to run, like the unfaithful lover who cannot choose to stay, who cannot choose submission, who cannot choose to fight for Truth. When I reject the Church, I choose a war of emotion and grief instead of love and peace; I run to my own beliefs, separating myself from the community of the church, choosing to look upon the bride of Christ with judgement and condemnation.

“A sect is separation, solitariness, the denial of communality. The sectarian spirit is the direct opposite of the Church spirit.”
-Fr Georges Florovsky

May we cling to the Church, that the Spirit of God who is in her may rid our hearts of a sectarian spirit. For, Truth is not a fragile thing.

Truth is absolute.

So I choose to stop rejecting her. I choose to stop being my own God and making up my own truth. I choose radical obedience to the Truth. I choose to stop running.

This is the Church.

Here there is hurt. Here there is healing.

We need to love her ripped and bleeding.

You ran well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion does not come from Him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. I have confidence in you, in the Lord, that you will have no other mind; but he who troubles you shall bear his judgment, whoever he is.
Galatians 5:7-10

To the hurt, 

Please know that healing is not a momentary, glorious event. It is hard, it is long, and it is a process. While these words are truths I believe in, there are days that it still hurts so much and I lose hope, thinking I am right back where I started. Healing is a journey, may we walk this long road together.

Check out Part II