Mother Theresa

~

“Imagine you’re walking through a forest.

Full of tall strong beautiful trees

Resilient against the wind and the rain

Beneath the soil

They are tied together

Intertwined

Beneath the soil

There are millions of roots

Connected

And they are better together

And when I think of these trees

I think of us

And how we try to go through life by ourselves

The times we’ve felt broken

The times we felt left

The times we’ve been hurt by someone else

We proclaim this loud and bold

But unlike the trees

We decide

To go it alone

I marvel at the pain

We can too easily shut out

I marvel at the years

We choose to lose sight

Everyday we see people’s wounds

But we never see past them

We never see through

We pick up our pace

We pick up our stones

We cross the other side of the road

We say there is no more room at our table

We love at a distance

We are only fair weather friends to weather the storms of this life

Because loving people’s imperfections is inconvenient and messy

Yet there’s no line of Scripture where Jesus commands us to seek our ease

No line where He commands that we seek our self

We look at people’s broken behaviours

ignore,

belittle

condemn

judge,

Look for quick cures but we do not see

Every broken behaviour comes from an unmet need

Behind every broken is someone who looks like our saviour

We go it alone

But alone is not what we were created for

Alone is not what the church was created to be

Isn’t it the one who cares for the poor and needy

The little and the least

Whom Christ will say come sit at my table

Come sit with me

When I hear this my immediate thought is

Where can I find a hungry

thirsty

naked

foreign

sick

imprisoned

stranger

Whom I can relieve

But In my attempts to love the needy

I discover my own poverty.

In clothing the naked,

I discover am naked of all virtue

In visiting the prisoner

I realise I am imprisoned by prideful thoughts

In visiting the sick

I learn I am sick with selfish desires.

I am who Jesus is referring to

I am the Least of These

It is not that poor guy on the street corner

Or the lonely girl in the corner,

who are the least of these.

No, it is me.

I am the least of Christ’s brethren.

I may not be poor naked sick or imprisoned in body

But I am poor naked sick and imprisoned in soul

I am starved of loving kindness

parched by lack of forgiveness

Sick with the disease of lust

Naked of compassion

Imprisoned by habits of self-indulgence.

And if I am the least,

If I really know that I am the least

Then the least that I can do

Is not go it alone

The least I can do is share my bread

When I am the one who hungers for righteousness

The least I can do is share my cup

When I am the one thirsting for Life.

The least I can do is share my stuff

When my I am so poor of anything valuable

The least I can do is sit with the lonely

When I am too lonely of the Father’s house

I have no clothes to cover my own sinful nakedness,

I have no medicine to heal my own blindness

I have no key to liberate my imprisoned soul.

Yet

He calls us His temple

Because we are pieces that come together to build and hold up one another

He calls us His body

Because we are all different parts and no purpose or function is like the other

He calls us His vine

Because we are only living when we are connected to one another

In Him

Like the trees

We were made to stand tall here

We were made to be a part of this forest here

Standing firm against all odds

Creation representing creator God

But our own fears of being hurt

Casts a shadow on the reality

That the fissures I see in my neighbour

Are the same fractures that covers me.

Wrapped tight in this fear, we act out against love.

And when we act out against love

We act out against the One Who loves us. “

“God is love.”

1 in 3

3 in 1

A community

Just as love is meaningless without something to love.

So we are meaningless without our brother

When our brother is our life

Just as one God exists as three Persons in one,

So we were created to be wholly ourselves

When we are wholly one with the other

We don’t pray my father

But our father

We are His children

Our husband

We are his bride

Our shepherd

We are His sheep

He is the one who never leaves the one behind

No one is saved alone.

Everyone’s freedom is tangled

Everyone salvation tied up

Roots beneath the soil

So there can be no fences

There can be no hedges

No neat marked out lines

Of what is yours and what is mine

Because where my life ends

Yours can begin

When we need each other to survive

So let’s close the distance between you and me

Trade in our fear for curiosity

Tear down our fences to build bridges

Open our door for those who have no place of their own

Step into each other’s darkness with kindness as a burning lantern

Love others through their brokenness

Because our brokenness makes us more alike than unlike.

The powerless, the wounded and the weak

All those who cannot speak

Come sit beside me and tell me your story

Tell me of the million and one ways a soul can bruise

And I can tell the million and one ways a soul sees the Light.

The Light loves with abandon

His wounded hands love the wounded with no bounds.

Because we were created for one another

We belong to each other

No matter the weather

Like trees in a forest

Stronger

Taller

Together”

~

Rewind to a year ago as 2016 gave way to 2017 and 2017 gave way to 2018; I was confronted by a what felt like an endless string of gut wrenching tragedies, dashed hopes and unkindness from the least expected of places. Sadness I hadn’t felt in years gripped my heart, threatening to freeze me to the bone, squeezing forcefully from it all traces of peace and courage.

I’m still raw from it all. I’m still prone to tears in the middle of the night. I’m still tired.

Sometimes shadow days turn to shadow months which snowball and avalanche into a relentless shadow year. I’m still waiting for winter to end and the snow to melt. My heart is left wondering why must this earthly life be riddled with so so so much loss and grief? How long Lord…Left with no solutions, no answer and in the absence of any feelings of warmth and bravery I have come to hardly recognise myself. Suffering has a way of stripping us naked as we confront the silence.

It is there in that silence that I have been wrestling with the question:

Who will I become after the coldest winter in a thousand freezing years?

I have spent a year flitting back and forth between answers, with no escape and no clue in the world what to do or where to go. Looking at this question and then looking at my distress and crippling disappointment of how different things should have been. “Lord, had you been here…” 

We’re told to expect trials in life when we’ve done something wrong, when something is not quite right in our relationship with God – but what happens when we feel we really did try to do what we were supposed to do, yet we are consumed by the shadow of our troubling sorrow. This is sorrow compounded by sorrow. Not only is there pain and loss but there is the crushing sense of God’s absence.

Silence and solitude can be the place of great transformation where we “struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self” but it can also be the most terrifying place when it feels like death and evil, are breathing down your neck, obliterating any sense of safety and comfort, and heightening the sense of inescapable frailty. Sometimes I have wrestled, other times I have taken one look at those questions, slammed the door of my heart when anger flared and smouldered and shut out the morning, all the while feeding the darkness. I don’t know what has brought me back but between grace and faithful friends that refuse to give up or go away, I find myself home again in silence and solitude, with my pain and my God.

So this season I am standing at the brink of the abyss of despair knowing all I have left is naked trust and naked hope that God is still God despite all of the evidence to the contrary, despite the agony and confusion and injustice of it all.

Can I say with Job, “Even if He slay me, yet will I trust in Him”? 

Do I turn to Christ or deny Christ (perhaps not so much with my words, but by my actions)?

Do I continue to love others or begin to blame, accuse and condemn others?

Do I become lost in self pity and never-ending reflection?

Do I thank God for all things, or do I grumble in my heart, demanding an explanation and another life?

Every difficult and painful circumstance in our life is a source of temptation. Because we are faced with a choice to say “You can do everything, And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You”(Job 42:2)…or to doubt Him. But with every temptation there is an opportunity.  An opportunity to grow in humility and patience.

Do I see myself as much more broken, much poorer, much more sinful and confused and clueless than I had expected?

Do I use my pain to at least strive to choose, to commit my self to God and trust in Him despite everything?

Do I see the silence and solitude as a gift to embrace, to turn death into resurrection, the gift to turn earth into heaven?

Do I remain obedient to Christs’ commands even when I feel abandoned like all this pain has somehow happened behind his back?

I am learning that who I will become after the coldest winter, begins and ends in how I answer these questions. But answering ‘yes’ boldly to those questions isn’t a given, not for me anyway. These are outright miracles – the working of grace in my life. I am humiliated and embarrassed to admit how far I’ve fallen from answering ‘yes.’ This is how, I suppose, I must learn to depend completely on the grace of God. In reality the most of what I can do is to lie down and wait. He wills my obedience despite my disappointment but if it does not always come as easily as I would like, then I remain waiting, knocking, seeking, asking – with the assurance that if I do such things I will in the end receive what I have sought. There is humility in this.

It was said that Saint Anthony had a vision of the world full of snares and traps. In a loud voice he cried out, “Lord, who can overcome these snares and traps?” A gentle voice was heard saying, “The humble.”

Rather than ask for humility, I ask God for mercy acknowledging that I am not humble, that I am not “patient in evils for His love’s sake.” If “humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all” what does this mean in overcoming the traps of suffering? I offer up my pain like I offer up myself as a living sacrifice through “ardent pursuit of prayer and the outpouring of tears” knowing I am too spiritually dull to know what to do about my pain—except to beg for His help.

Humility is using our present circumstances, no matter how powerless and paralysed we feel, as an opportunity to grow in faith, hope, and love and to better serve Him and our neighbours. Perhaps this is why resting our aching spirit outside the gates of repentance when the world beckons to give us relief from our pain is the hardest part of the silence and solitude.

Humility is continuing to love Him and not forsake what He loves when we are broken, despite how unsatisfying obedience and holiness may feel, which in turn creates a place in us for peace to dwell. There is no peace when we lash out in bitterness and despondency.

Humility is trusting Christ’s tender compassion to provide not what I want but what I need, because He is a good Father. It is doing the next right thing. So putting one foot in front of the other, I find snippets of contentment and calm, I show up for the sacraments and for prayer and I show up in the every day lives of my neighbours to be a salt and a light and to share in their joys and sorrows.

Faithfulness in the midst of dying to ourselves is even more precious than joy after Christ’s Resurrection and the relief of despair. Joy and thanksgiving in tribulation, rooted in the knowledge that I am radically loved by a God who is perfecting me, may be the most precious of all, though this joy and gratitude often eludes me. I am certain in the Resurrection we will see with spiritual eyes and we will weep with understanding, remorse, relief, and immeasurable gratitude. Our shadow days will be over. Winter will end.

“Complete trust in God – that’s what holy humility is. Complete obedience to God, without protest, without reaction, even when some things seem difficult and unreasonable. Abandonment to the hands of God.” Elder Porphyrios

“For in proportion to your humility you are given patience in your woes; and in proportion to your patience, the burden of your afflictions is made lighter and you will find consolation; in proportion to your consolation, your love of God increases; and in proportion to your love, your joy in the Holy Spirit is magnified.” St Isaac the Syrian

“Instinctively we cry, “Make haste unto me.” But He does not always respond at once. Like fruit on a tree , our soul is left to scorch in the sun, to endure the cold wind, the scorching wind, to die of thirst or be drowned in the rain. But if we do not let go of the hem of His garment, all will end well.” Elder Sophrony

God saves the humble who cannot save themselves.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”― Sylvia Plath

Last September I had a pretty big decision to make about where I was going to accept a job. I called up the people who knew me best to get their insight, asked my father of confession for his wisdom and spoke to people working in the same field for their perspective.

Whether it’s deciding over relationships, colleges, schools or jobs, sometimes we might find ourselves with two seemingly great choices, and so we find ourselves in a dilemma. Each choice will come at a cost; each choice will have positives and negatives, and ultimately no choice will be perfect.

I’ve never been a fan of pros and cons lists – I find that life can’t be categorised that easily. However, a friend gave me advice that helped. I was told to assign a value to each point under my two options. When I started writing the values I held, I started to see that while both choices were in line with the vision I had for my life, there were some values that were more significant than others. And while one option had way more values than the other, the other which only had a couple were much more fundamental to me.

A few of the things I’ve learned this season…

“We don’t know what to do but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12). In the midst of his crisis, King Jehoshaphat acted by praising God. We also in the midst of our confusion and turmoil over decisions, need to learn the art laying our anxieties and restless thoughts down, being still and opening our heart in worship. The voice of the Holy Spirit can be so gentle that it’s only when we spend time in his presence that we can discern His Voice from all the noise.

Pray and learn from whatever happens on the other side. No matter what you choose, there will be struggle, and there will be trials for we know “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). Sometimes those are a result of our choices, but in the end, they will be used by God to sanctify us and purify us. Living with our eyes on eternity is important in those seasons to understand that nothing is outside of His never-ending and unfailing love and mercy. There is no such thing as Plan B or Z with Christ. He will use all for our deification; it might take us longer on certain paths but even then, all we need to do is repent, and we are restored.

There’s a principle in radiology that says even if you find the fracture on an x-ray you should keep looking for other signs because you don’t want to be blindsided. Bring your decision before the Lord in prayer and meditation but challenge yourself to be curious and look deeper into your intentions, motivations and reasons for each choice. Give yourself time, patience and space and trust that the Holy Spirit will examine you, try you and reveal what is in depths of your heart.

Sometimes God’s will is clear and other times, most times, God allows us the freedom to choose and become whoever we want, though He may certainly have a direction for you. Submission is hard as we deny our self that we may be dedicated to Another. The hardest part in all of this is asking God “Who do you want me to be?” I think of Mary, called to be Mother of God; Abraham called to be Father of Nations and the disciples called to be Fishers of Men. God revealed to them who they were in His eyes and with that promise He gave them the strength and grace to become. Sometimes we don’t know how to choose because we don’t know who God is asking us to be. That may not be a question that gets answered overnight, it needs silence and self-awareness and time alone with Him. Sometimes it’s a process – it takes making one choice faithfully, and waiting faithfully and then making another and waiting to see what is revealed. But it’s a question we all desperately need the answer to – more than what we do God wants us to know who we are. It is only in knowing that, can we then make the decisions about what we do, how we spend our time, money and emotions. Because where we invest our heart, there we invest our life.

What if there is no such thing as the perfect choice? Because choosing means we can’t have everything. Because we don’t know how things will change and how those things that change will change us. Because we don’t know who we will be or what we will need in the future? Because we can sit here and play “what if the the grass is greener over there?” all day and it won’t bring us any closer to an answer – only further from being satisfied. And what if none of that matters because the point is to grow and seek His kingdom regardless of our choices?

So trust yourself. Most of our choices are not made in isolation. Where we are now and the choices we are making today is a culmination of all the choices and experiences in the past that have led up to this point. Trust that the God who has knit you from birth, has been guiding you and shaping you like clay can lead you today in this choice. Sometimes it’s fear of not having the perfect picture of our future figured out that holds us back.

A year later I’m fighting to find peace in the unknown road I’m on, but I want to continue to fight and continue to hope in Him because when I put the pieces in front of me, they don’t fit. Before me lays the back of a colourful tapestry and I have little idea what the canvas is going to look like. There are some dark threads from the past and some strange shapes from the present. But if I let Him just take all the colours, threads and pieces, I don’t have to sit and stare at them. The root of every untrusting feeling is the fear that He is not in fact good and that His love will end, especially when I feel I have no clue or answers about what to do. But if I forfeit my desire to know every outcome, if I forfeit the need to have physical evidence or feeling as evidence, then I will trust in His Word that He is with me, and that He is weaving stars and gold from what looks like odd patterns to me. And doesn’t that make all the difference?

C.S. Lewis — ‘I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?’

One choice we can always make, even in the midst of painful uncertainty, the simplest place to start is with this: “Love the Lord your God … and love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater…”  You will always be where you need to be as long as Love is your aim.

What do all these 3 things that can make us want to leave the Father’s house and never come back have in common?

Pain.

Sometimes writing in hindsight makes the journey sound neat – that life is about the destination (you know, that imaginary point where we feel invincible and everything is just wonderful) and the journey to get there is the inconvenient, unnecessary part.

This is not one of those blog posts. I haven’t climbed a mountain. I haven’t been able to look back in the struggle to say “Look at how everything has fallen into place. Look at how far I’ve come after all the hard days, long miles and deep waters!”

This is a blog post to say, for all of us who who have climbed only to fall, who have decided the mountain isn’t worth it or who have climbed so long only to feel like they aren’t moving and who feel like they don’t even know how or what it means to climb anymore – I’m with you.

Sometimes I think of the prodigal son. I think of his decision to leave and I wonder why. Was it a a conscious decision he made even after tasting the fullness of his Father’s love and the joy of being in his house? Did he believe there was no need for this love in his life? Was he discontent and dissatisfied? Bored? Confined? Did he feel let down in any way by his Father? Maybe he felt like there was something better out there? Did he feel his identity as the Father’s son was a false mirage? Perhaps he did he not really know his Father’s love? Did he think he would just leave for a little while and come back? Did he always secretly believe his Father would always be there for him when he decided to come back?

So sometimes we choose to pack our faith and our promises and leave, just like the prodigal son.

I’m not here to offer an answer to that, though I wish I could. I also feel that our incessant search for answers in the spiritual life misses the beauty of communion with Him.

“the final end of being must be thought of as beauty and not as goodness,’ not fulfillment of law but the synergy of divine and human creative freedom for the sake of the eternal kingdom of Love… ‘beauty lies beyond the knowledge of good and evil’ and all of the division and disharmony of sin.” 

Beauty isn’t necessarily getting it right but it’s definitely coming home with nothing but “‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight”. That reliance and need for Him to take us back. There is something so deeply beautiful about that tested type of love that no theology book can teach. Wrestling with Him, sharing your weakness and the sheer honesty of letting Him see through every lie about “being okay.” When you finally admit “I give up trying. I have no fight left.”

One thing I do know is how we can run searching for cover when in pain. It can challenge all meaning we once placed on the things we cared for and valued, including ourselves and our God. It is a terribly violent internal revolution when we want to run away from everything we’ve ever known, even to the point of ruining ourselves like hyperkeratinsed skin that has numbed all feeling.

When all we’ve felt is pain for so long, we can almost become attracted to the chaos, the fire and the flood. That when anything or anyone else stretches out a safe hand, we flinch. We deny. We run to the darkness and keep ourselves hostage. Then we throw ourselves back down the rabbit hole and block all exits like a really bad case of Stockholm syndrome. It can be hard to be conscious in those moments, long enough to realise we are running with the wolves. But we were never made to inhale the darkness.

This is not a post to tell anyone how they should survive, or to tell you that you should be stronger and that being disappointed in God isn’t “theologically correct.’ Because I know what it feels like to believe that jumping in stormy seas is safer than clinging to the Rock of salvation. To know that God can see you “straining at rowing, for the wind was against them” (Mark 6:48) and remain silent, like a door slammed shut.

This is a post to say that sometimes broken hearts or wounds can sometimes make us feel like we live with secret knowledge and fresh insights into the human condition. Because we can see more clearly than those who are “whole” (i.e., the average, hypocritical churchgoer). We can use that to justify leaving our Father’s house or staying with a distorted image of who He is. We can think “You can’t change. Embrace who you are.” But the gospel says be transformed by the renewal of your mind (Rom. 12:2).

This is a post to say, we are all living under the rubble of the human condition, weak, tired, lonely, waiting for answers, or waiting for the pain to feel like glory. And sometimes leaving is easier when we get so confused and caught up in logic and rationalism and what is black and or white in our ideas of what Christianity means. But “Beauty will save the world,”  wrote Fyodor Dostoyevesky. For when we recognise Beauty, we shift our paradigm from sin as merely violating the Law. It can help use perceive sin more rightly, as something that deforms the divine goodness of beauty, truth and love that God imbued in creation. Maybe if we saw with those glasses we would feel less likely to self destruct after we sin or lose hope?

This is a post it say it is okay to wander and feel lost, cupping our heart in our hand close to our chest, trying to figure things out. It is okay to talk about how afraid and hurt we are. It is a post to say, just because pain may feel more comfortable than joy, just because insecurity may feel more comfortable than believing in our worth, just because leaving may feel more comfortable than coming home – does not mean it needs to be. When we allow ourselves to feel His love, when we allow Him to get near, then, knowing we are being loved will make us want to be worthy of being loved. And maybe there is just a part of us that wants to see the kind of person we could be, through someone else’s eyes other than our own. Someone who isn’t measured by their fight but the guts to say “I don’t understand what is happening, but after trying to live this life on my own all I feel is emptiness. Things make less sense without You than they do with You.”

It is not easy. But together we can try. Even with shaking hands – just try.

Because in the fourth hour of the night He is coming – walking on all your stormy seas.

“Then He went up into the boat to them, and the wind ceased.” Mark 6:50.

Soon your winds will cease.

“Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Sometimes we think that we are in need of a perfect home with everything neatly in place to show hospitality. And sometimes we think we need a perfect heart that has it all together to invite someone in and build that home. But there are homes we build with our friends not with hands but with conversations of openness and honesty, with the comfort to be as we are, who we are, where we are now. With all our sins and struggles and all our questions and doubts. Sharing death and grief, sex and desire, our needs, deepest inadequacies and regrets. We uncover the demolition in our hearts, unafraid of displaying the rubble, unafraid of leaving the keys to the doors we’ve always locked for someone else to walk in. In the face of each other’s rubble, there is no space for judgement, only the realisation that we all stand on the same levelled ground, a holy ground, where our pain and our struggles are communally felt, without measure, without degrees. Hospitality is the fearlessness to offer others a key into your warzone, and the fearlessness to choose to be present with another.

Many of us were raised strictly associating spiritual growth with the attendance of bible studies, worship evenings, quiet time and locking our bedroom doors in prayer. But there is spiritual growth at 2am at the back of a pickup truck, with seven hearts drawn in laughter and in love. There is growth in 6am swims through the river and in sharing water shoes when the rocks become too harsh beneath your feet. There is growth in conversations over eggs benedict and in sharing the words of people who have previously hurt and condemned us, and the relationships that have left us feeling less than who we were. There is growth in reconnecting with old friends and learning the hearts of new ones, because where there are people, there is God, and that is where we grow and self discover. There is growth in the daily victory of waking up and trying, trying, and trying again. There is growth in struggling through loss to believe that God is good, and there is also growth in firmly believing through the tragedy that God is good.

When we let God out of the man-made spiritual boxes we have created, we need not look far or deep or wide to see His face, but to the heart next to us to realise that He is here. For long we have found Him in foreign mission fields and in retreats, yet now we are awakened to find Him in His people, the church, the home that is built without hands.

After years of living under the weight of expectations and who we “should” be, many of us have locked so many doors of our hearts away for the fear of being known, for fear of being perceived as not spiritual, as not a man or woman of God. When we have tasted the condemnation of a community, that labels and silences us, our fears can only be rational and our walk becomes heavy. We were never called to pretend a false state of perfection. We were created in the image of Community for community. A community that is real, that moves from individualism to a place where we can reach out and ask why we’re created in a fallen world or why it’s so hard to hear God’s voice sometimes.

We all naturally gravitate to the community that will accept us for all we bring to the table, so we find ourselves projecting the finished product of ourselves that we believe our community desires so that we can find our home. All the while we live with the fear of truly being known and found out. We live in fear that one day someone will tear down the door to our demolition and see the truth; to see our addictions and the tears that keep us up at night. But Christ was always interested in the real authentic version of ourselves. Christ was never interested in the finished product more than he was in our journey to wholeness. And community was only ever meant to be a place without fear. A place where all we ask is to see with loving eyes, instead of with defense or judgment, the person before us. All of the wonder, grace and godliness lying in the demolition that is yet to be restored. We hope in the yet to come but we love and live the now of each other – no matter how much is taken apart. Hospitality is loving without the need to put it all back together. And hospitality never demands an invite. It waits, it loves, it is patient.

To our friends on that August summer night, we are eternally grateful for your stories.

“Maybe we’re all just shiny balls of light inside human machines.

Maybe we’re all trying desperately to convince others that the noise they hear coming out of our mouths is an accurate reflection of the intentions of the shiny ball of light inside the machine.

Maybe it screams,

“I am real in here, I am real in here, I am real here.”

Maybe the light inside me just wants to know, if you’re real too.”

-Iain Thomas

Co-written with Makrina

a) the fear of knowing yourself

b) the power that it gives the person we are being vulnerable with

Being vulnerable, whether that’s apologising or confessing a fear, mistake or insecurity requires a level of self-reflection and it is terrifying to go into your own darkness.  By sharing that with another person we’re taking a huge emotional risk by placing this sacred piece of our soul in their hand. A piece that they may not know how to handle with care. A piece they can either be compassionate and gentle with or that they can totally break into fragments if they react in disgust or rejection to our vulnerability. So vulnerability is hard because knowing my own darkness is agonising and also because taking someone deep into that darkness means they can confirm our worst fear – that we’re too dark to be loved or worthy of love. And that is a kind of pain that can leave the most damaging of scars.

But I think there is also another part that we miss which makes vulnerability seem so dangerous and uncertain.

When I take someone into that darkness and I reveal a part of me that is wounded or hurting,  an unspoken level of accountability is forged. Especially if I deeply love the person with whom I’m being vulnerable with, which is normally the case, because love requires that I do whatever it takes to be the best for them. So it follows that if I am ready to share a shortcoming, I am ready to try to move away from it.

Most of the time, vulnerability in any relationship will happen when we’re apologising, trying to explain our actions to someone or trying to help them understand why we reacted in a certain way. It usually means that the very thing we’re being vulnerable about probably affects the person that we are being vulnerable to.

By sharing this with them and releasing it into the open and into the light, I can no longer say I didn’t know about my own inadequacies. I can no longer turn a blind eye or ignore it. More importantly, I can no longer hide from it because now another soul can see. I am faced with one choice – confront it, fight it and grow.

I think that’s an incredibly scary thing about vulnerability – more than the emotional exposure, it’s the place that the emotional exposure thrusts us. And where is that? A place that means we must choose to be different and change.

Vulnerability is hard because “despair is more comforting than hope.” In the pit of my own darkness I am free to languish in hopelessness and sorrow, but once I am vulnerable, whether I’m received with compassion or not, I have no excuse to remain in my tattered fig leaves rather than animal skin. The fear is that: ‘What if it takes me too long to change? What if they give up on me?’ This is when the shame creeps in and like our forefather, Adam, we want to run.

Vulnerability creates accountability and that’s a huge responsibility to shoulder.

Perhaps that’s why vulnerability can be much easier in retrospect, sharing wounds that have been and gone. Being vulnerable in the moment, being vulnerable about the very brokenness that still breaks you so well, really is the biggest risk. And here is the kicker: ‘What if, by revealing my shame or weakness, so that I may be known,  I’m actually giving them the reason to walk away from me?’

Maybe this is why vulnerability feels like weakness; not just because of the exposure but because of the position of responsibility it puts us in where there is no more space for blaming others and pointing fingers. I must own the story of my weakness.

Vulnerability doesn’t guarantee anything. It isn’t a miracle in a bottle. Yes, it is ultimately a risk that can leave us naked and alone, but without it we have no connection.

So there will come a time, when we think of the past; every single time trust was offered to someone in vulnerability and was irretrievably broken, when we think of the present, the people in our life we are called to love as our own soul and when we think of the future, the kind of love we want our life to profess and we are compelled to ask: “is vulnerability worth it?”

What if staying and being vulnerable with those trusted souls in our lives breaks our plan? Everything comes at a cost, and though waters may rise and vulnerability may fail us along with those we trust, if love is the fulfillment of the law, then there is no cost that is wasted. Nothing is wasted for love – may our souls never forget to wear this God-breathed truth like second skin.

Click here to read part 1 of our vulnerability series!

Photo courtesy of  Zachary Snellenberger

“The story of Mary of Egypt emphasizes that her prostitution as not a formal one. As the liturgical text puts it in the first person: “For nearly seventeen years I lived as a fire for public depravity but not at all for money. … I wanted to do it and I did it for nothing.” One day she followed male pilgrims to Jerusalem aboard ship from Alexandria, hoping to seduce as many as she could. In Jerusalem she wanted to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the appointed day for veneration of the Cross but could not, an invisible force seeming to hold her back. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with tears of contrition and began to pray. Returning the next morning, Mary was able to enter the church and venerate the cross. Then she quit the city, crossing the Jordan River with a little bread and a water jug, where she lived as a hermit in the desert caves for forty years.” Benedicta Ward

St Mary of Egypt is a proper example of the transformation of the Christian life because her story didn’t end there; she “struggled with wild beasts, desires and passions” for 17 years out of the 47 years in the desert. May we battle our lust with ferocity in our striving for purity, through repentance, fasting and praying, until we can say with St Mary “a calm and sweet light descended and enlightened me and chased away the thoughts that possessed me.” Transformation through repentance and the sacraments looks more like a journey than a destination. It is not a one-time event but a mode of existence. Even after we experience victory, in the wise words of my spiritual father, may we never cease to “respect our weaknesses” lest we assume that we are less of a prisoner to the same passions.

Lord God, cause my heart, soul, and mind to be so overtaken by Your grace that I share the testimony of the sinful woman who anointed Your feet. You said of her, “I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven – for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.” (Luke 7:47)

Lord, I willingly admit that I am weak in my natural self. I used to offer the parts of my body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness. I now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. (Romans 6:19)

Lord, Your Word says how I can keep my way pure: by living according to Your Word. I will seek You with all my heart; help me not stray from Your commands. Help me to hide Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You. (Psalm 119:9-11)

Holy God, turn my eyes away from worthless things; preserve my life according to Your Word. Take away the disgrace I dread, for Your laws are good. (Psalm 119:37-39)

Lord God, teach me knowledge and good judgment, for I believe in Your commands. Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey Your word. You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees. (Psalm 119:66-68)

Lord God, guard my course and protect my way as I pursue a righteous, victorious life in You. (Proverbs 2:8)

Lord, help me not despise Your discipline and not to resent Your rebuke, because You discipline those You love. (Proverbs 3:11-12)

Lord God, Your Word says that You bless the home of the righteous, but Your curse is on the house of the wicked. (Proverbs 3:33) Lord, please help me cleanse my home of any kind of materials that support or fuel wickedness. Make this the kind of home You can fully bless.

Lord, help me to keep my eyes looking straight ahead and fix my gaze directly before me. Make level paths for my feet and strengthen me to take only ways that are firm. Help me not to swerve to the right or the left; keep my feet from evil. (Proverbs 4:25-27)

Lord God, help me to guard my heart above all else for it is the wellspring of life. Help me to put away perversity from my mouth and keep corrupt talk far from my lips. (Proverbs 4:23-24)

According to Your Word, a man’s ways are in full view of the Lord, and You examine all our paths. The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him; the cord of his sin hold him fast. He will die for lack of discipline, led astray by his own folly. (Proverbs 5:21-23)
Lord, self-discipline is a fruit of the Spirit. Please fill me with Your Spirit and empower me with a self-discipline only You can give. (Galatians 5:22-23)

God, please help me to love You with my whole heart, soul, mind, and strength for this is Your priority for my life. (Mark 12:30) Help me also to love others so that I will not want to engage them in any kind of dishonoring activity. (Mark 12:31) Break my heart when I even think of doing what is dishonorable, my God, You who had no sin to be sin for me, so that in Him I might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Lord Jesus, Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – help me to think about such things. (Philippians 4:8-9)

Lord God, make me into a pure virgin emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and even set this body apart to be used as an instrument of righteousness from now on. Please help me not to be deceived by the serpent’s cunning and allow my mind to be led astray from my new commitment of sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2 Corinthians 11:2-3)

Lord, who can say, “I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin?” (Proverbs 20:9) Lord, I am powerless to possess a pure and clean heart on my own. Only You can do it for me. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me…Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. (Psalm 51:10, 12)

Lord, I admit that I reaped absolutely no benefit from the things I am guilty of. Those things result in death. But now that I have been set free, the benefit I am reaping leads to holiness and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:20-23)

Thank you, God, for promising that no temptation has seized me except what is common to man. And You, God, are faithful; You will not let me be tempted beyond what I can bear. But when I am tempted You will also provide a way out so that I can stand up under it. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

Father God, through constant use of the solid food of Your Word, help me to train myself to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:14)

Lord God, since I have a Great High Priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus Your Son, help me hold firmly to the faith I profess. For I do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with my weaknesses, but I have one who has been tempted in every way, just as I am, yet without sin. Help me then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that I may receive mercy and find grace to help me in the time of need. (Hebrews 4:14-16)

Lord of glory, You have a plan for me that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has conceived. Your Spirit reveals this awesome plan to those who love You. (1 Corinthians 2:9) I acknowledge that Satan’s ploy is to keep me from fulfilling Your plan for my life. Please help me to resist him and overcome his assaults on my life. I want to do Your will, O God.

Lord God, I don’t want to remain a carnal Christian. I want to be a spiritual believer to whom You can speak and through whom You can minister. Please activate the mind of Christ in me daily that I may live in victory. (1 Corinthians 2:16; 3:1)

Lord, help me to rid myself of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like a newborn baby, help me to crave pure spiritual milk, so that I may grow up in my salvation, now that I have tasted that the Lord is good. (1 Peter 2:1-2)

Since I have a Great Priest over the house of God, help me to draw near to You, God, with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having my heart sprinkled to cleanse me from a guilty conscience and having my body washed with pure water. Help me to hold unswervingly to the hope I profess, for He who promises is faithful. (Hebrews 10:21-23)

I am one of Your chosen people, O God, part of a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that I may declare the praises of You who called me out of darkness into Your wonderful light. I have now received mercy. You urge me as a stranger in this world to abstain from sinful desires, which war against my soul. (1 Peter 2:9-11)

God, You demonstrated Your love for me in that while I was still a sinner, You died for me. (Romans 5:8) Lord, help me to understand that You gave Your life to pay the debt for even the most heinous sins I could have committed. Your grace covers all sin if I will repent and receive.

Lord Jesus, You Yourself bore my sins in Your body on the tree so that I might die to sins and live for righteousness; by Your wounds I have been healed. For I was like a sheep going astray, but now I have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of my soul. (1 Peter 2:24-25)

Lord God, You grant Your incomparably great power to those of us who believe. This same power is the mighty strength You exerted when You raised Christ from the dead. (Ephesians 1:19-20) If You can raise the dead, You have all the power I need to live victoriously over every stronghold!

I have been crucified with You, Christ, and I no longer live, but You live in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in You, the Son of God, who loved me and gave Yourself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)

These prayers are an excerpt from ‘Praying God’s Word’ by Beth Moore.

“You remind me…what I dare not speak of. For when I recall all the dangers which I overcame, and all the violent thoughts which confused me, I am again afraid that they will take possession of me.” 

From a canonical account of St. Mary of Egypt

(Photo courtesy of Evgeny Tchebotarev)

There is a question that I believe can transform our relationships, a question we need to all ask each other more:

How can I comfort you?

Above all, remember “if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves…Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself.” (Philippians 2)

It is the comfort God has lavished on us that calls us to comfort others. Because of the pain we’ve felt, we no longer have to be strangers to the pain of another. When we choose to walk through the difficult times with Him by surrendering our ego and emptying ourself, we can receive the tenderness and gentleness of His healing presence. When we experience the power within His humility that invites, the power within His soft touch that had no fear in gently touching the blind or lame, nor writing carefully in the sand to help another; we will know how to comfort others out of our own ache.

Yet how often do I ask my loved ones how they need to be comforted? How often do I wonder how they receive comfort best? How often do I pay attention to learn which actions or words resonate deeply with them and which don’t? How often am I quick to comfort those in my life in the way I like to be comforted, neglecting that they are not me? Comfort has a language of its own and there is something undeniably powerful in a friend who knows how to speak the language of comfort that your soul understands, like feeling that everything you lost in the pain is coming back to you.

“The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.”  Stephen Covey

I still remember the day I found out that I had to withdraw from medical school. I remember wanting nothing more than to run from the torment of failure as I felt the foundation that I had built my dreams, hopes and even identity crumble. That was the same day I tasted comfort, like the Promised Land dripping of milk and honey in the midst of a wilderness, in a way I had never known before.

My friend stayed with me, cried with me, wrapped me in a red blanket and sang Psalm 13 to me.

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?…But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.” 

Divine comfort took on flesh in my friend’s faithfulness to stay. This Psalm embodies the true unsurpassed beauty of comfort. Though it may not change our circumstances, though it may not take away the pain, it strengthens our heart to praise in defiance of the moment. True comfort is a fortress against wailing winds and the fearful elements of disaster that threaten to swallow our home. Because my friend stayed, I know that it takes an embrace and a shirt to stain with mascara and tears, to remember to breathe, find a moment to be still – just like that, I settle, soften and make space for the pain. The harsh voice of judgement drops to a whisper and I remember again that as much as I want to stop the madness and control the chaos, I can ask for the grace to let go through the healing found in comfort. Together with those who are long-suffering enough to bear our burdens, who choose to decrease as He increases in them by comforting us, we walk slowly into the mystery. The mystery that more than answers or solutions people desire comfort. More than fleeing from a broken and contrite heart, refusing the suffering, God desires our surrender. Surrender is not defeat, but victory. To learn how to comfort and to be willing to receive comfort from one another is how we win.

“You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other…instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace.” St Seraphim of Sarov

Sometimes comfort comes to us in unexpected packages; His is the gift of his own life within us, sharing His own joy and love in the midst of the confusion and anxiety that encloses us, in the midst of all the ways we try to escape from the pain outside of His life in us.

With His life in me, I am given a choice, to waste my pain and the pain of others or to give and accept comfort freely. And so as with all of life, it is always choices such as these that determine where we are going and how our own journey moulds us and influences those around us. It is a choice to be a healing presence to others. With this choice, pray to be sensitive to how the person before you longs to be comforted. Be brave enough to give sacrificially to meet each other’s need to be comforted and to ask: how can I comfort you?

“Love is not contingent on our wholeness. Love is with us in our shame, our fear, our weakness, and is with us through it. And Love has the final word”

“What does it mean to become a healing presence? And probably more important, how do we increase our ability to do that? I think already you can see that this definition is an operational definition for love delivered; love on the street; love in our lives; love with each other.

Let’s look at what a healing presence is. It means that when someone, you or me or some other human, has done something to give me strength or hope. And you might ask in your life recently, who in your life did give you strength or hope when you felt in need a little? And what were the ingredients of that? How was that done? That’s the way we learn how to do that for each other. It means that I do something and give someone else what Christ gives through me. Grace has a life of its own. And in that sense, healing can become contagious. Others feel it, experience, and see it, and then perhaps do it a little more themselves.

Christ is our physician; our complete healer. And He wants us to be His humanity on this earth for each other, to the extent that we can. We’re His healing presence for each other or not. We are a healing presence to others when we give them strength; we have an encounter with them. We give them strength when we give them hope. They leave us, whether it’s a very brief or a sustained encounter, with strength and hope.”

Albert Rossi

Identity |ʌɪˈdɛntɪti|

noun (pl. identities)

the fact of being who or what a person or thing is, the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is

“We contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman. Identity is the ground in which our roots find a home. Drifting and unearthed roots will wander aimless and lost in a dream world of pseudo-freedom. And roots on thorny or rocky ground grow weak and vulnerable trees.

What is our identity? What is our frame of reference for the Truth, the paradigms that form the lens for our perception of Truth, the maps we use to find our way to Truth? Is it the shakeable ground of seeing the world as we are? Or is it the solid and firm ground of seeing through God’s living Word, by which He spoke things into being?

Our struggle with the question “Who am I?” is one we can not answer without knowing where we have come from and where our roots lie. So to ask “Who am I?” is to ask “Who is my Mother, “the pillar and the ground of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15)?”

“A man cannot have God as his Father if he does not have the Church as his Mother.”

Saint Cypria

The Church; my Mother, His bride. Late have I loved her as I ought, because late have I truly seen her and known her as “the Church without beginning, without end and eternal, just as the Triune God, her founder, is without beginning, without end and eternal” (St Porphyrios). Perhaps, humanity bends towards seeing things as they appear to be and not as they were created to be.

“She is a divine institution and in her dwells the whole fullness of divinity. She is an expression of the richly varied wisdom of God. She is the mystery of mysteries. She was concealed and was revealed in the last of times. The Church remains unshaken because she is rooted in the love and wise providence of God.”

St Porphyrios

Beyond a building, the Church is a deep mystery of Christ with us, an extension of the Incarnation. As Father Alexander Schmemman wrote, the church is “not an ‘essence’ or ‘being’ distinct, as such, from God, man, and the world, but is the very reality of Christ in us and us in Christ, a new mode of God’s presence and action in His creation, of creation’s life in God…She is union and unity, knowledge, communion and transfiguration.” God’s gift of this mystery to man is what endows the four walls of the church with all meaning and life as the manifestation of the Kingdom of God.

“Where the Church is, there is the Spirit, and where the Spirit is, there is the Church,” states St. Iranaeus. The Church is the Kingdom of life eternal where the descent of the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life, renewed creation through restoration in Christ, in His incarnation, death, resurrection and glorification.

The “organ of Christ’s redeeming work” (Chrestos Androutsos) where the continuing presence of Pentecost exists, where creation is transfigured by Christ, sanctified by the Holy Spirit and finds not only communion and reconciliation but fulfillment in the revelation of the kingdom which is “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:7). The beauty of Pentecost is found in “diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit” (1 Cor 12:4). This is the same Spirit of freedom that unites us in our diversity in so that our life in the Church is vivid with distinct personalities rather than dull, rigid and uniform.

In the intersection between the visible and invisible, worshipping congregations and heavenly hosts of angels, divine and human, nature and grace, material and the spiritual, present age and the life to come; the Church is found and is our preparation “for a better country-a heavenly one.” (Heb 11:1). She is a triumphant passage from old into the new, from the kingdom of nature into the Kingdom of Grace. The paradox remains, though she abides in the world she is otherworldly; just as we “are dead and [our] life is hid with Christ in God” (Col 3:3); she is in pilgrimage and anticipation, in repentance and struggle. She is mission and vision of the salvation of all creation so that she may announce and witness to Christ, encompassing the totality of human history to offer, in Christ, the whole creation to God.

At the beating, pulsing heart of the sacramental Church is the Eucharist, our passover from this world into the Kingdom and partaking of His divine nature and immortal life.  “We, who are many, are one bread, one body; for we all partake of the one bread.” (1 Cor 10:17)

“The Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, and she must constantly fulfill herself as oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. Her visible oneness is to be realized as the very content of the new life (“that they may be one as we are one”) and as the unity of all in God and with God. The objective holiness of her life (the gifts of grace and sanctification which pour from all her acts) is to be fulfilled and realized in the personal holiness of her members. The catholicity (the absolute fullness of the gospel she announces and the life she communicates) is to grow into the “wholeness” of the faith and life of each community, of each Christian, and of the whole Church. Her apostolicity (her identity in time and space with the pleroma of the Church manifested at Pentecost) is to be preserved whole and undistorted by every generation, always and everywhere.”

Father Alexander Schmemmen

In the dichotomy of imperfect humanity and the sinless saints in heaven, the Church exists in a tension. We may be no strangers to the ‘Church of the penitents, the Church of those who perish’ (St Ephraim the Syrian). Wounds from our mother can taint and fracture trust, but sin of man can never affect the nature of the Church which is intrinsically linked to God. The Church is inherently heavenly and taught by the Spirit and so can not sin, fail, be deceived or choose falsehood over truth. We must fight to hold fast to Truth: “Orthodoxy does not believe merely in an ideal Church, invisible and heavenly. This ‘ideal Church’ exists visibly on earth as a concrete reality.” (Bishop K. Ware)

“The mystery of the Church consists in the very fact that together sinners become something different from what they are as individuals; this “something different” is the Body of Christ.” 

John Meyendorff

To be rooted in Christ is to be rooted in His body and the dwelling place of the Spirit, the Church and the sacraments, “strengthened in the faith as you were taught and overflowing with thankfulness” (Col 2:7).

Let your roots grow deep and wide “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Eph 2:20).

Sow those roots securely in Christ Who can not be torn separate from the Church since She is ‘the living image of eternity within time’ (Vladimir Lossky)

“The love of God created us in His image and likeness. He embraced us within the Church in spite of the fact that He knew of our apostasy. He gave us everything to make us gods too through the free gift of grace. For all that, we made poor use of our freedom and lost our original beauty, our original righteousness and cut ourselves off from the Church. Outside the Church, far from the Holy Trinity, we lost Paradise, everything. But outside the Church there is no salvation, there is no life. And so the compassionate heart of God the Father did not leave us exiled from His love. He opened again for us the gates of Paradise in the last times and appeared in flesh…God in His infinite love united us again with His Church in the person of Christ. On entering into the uncreated Church, we come to Christ, we enter into the realm of the uncreated. We the faithful are called to become uncreated grace, to be come participants in the divine energies of God, to enter into the mystery of divinity, to surpass our worldly frame of mind, to die to the ‘old man’ and to become immersed in God. When we live in the Church we live in Christ. This is a very fine-drawn matter, we cannot understand it. Only the Holy Spirit can teach us it.”

St Porphyrios

Check out Part V

To those who have ever loved,

To those who have ever lost,

To those who have never forgotten.

This is for the broken ones who have learnt the lessons of love and faith the hard way; even in imperfection there are notes of freedom, flashes of beauty and redemption.

This is an open letter to those who have emerged from relationships with a masterpiece of scars splattered on a canvas of remorse. This is an open letter to those who never felt wanted and pursued. This is an open letter to those who have watched from afar as one after the other of their friends evaded the pain of unrequited love while they have felt stung and stuck in the same place. This is an open letter to those who have been lied to or cheated on. This is an open letter to anyone who has made a mistake in the arena of love and to the generous lovers, the brave ones who refuse to be defeated and will rise again to enter the arena one more time. There is a reason your heart is the size of a fist, keep fighting, keep feeling, keep loving.

To the lonely,

When did you feel lonely?

I know you crave companionship and intimacy. The art of human connection is to be unashamed and unafraid in intimacy. The freedom of Adam and Eve – the intimacy in union. It is not wrong to desire that. You are not somehow faulty or defective. Believe that God’s will is such that no sin, ignorance, or miscalculation on your part can thwart. His love is so strong and so inseparable from us that not even our own blindness or foolishness can hinder His perfect love. Lonely hearts know they have need, and heaven knows that all we need in this life is need. A need that says I need the shadows of Your wings and the arms of Your embrace. Maybe you have realised now that He is the one that always stays when all else fades away. He is the one who always picks up the pieces. Lonely hearts know that to be known and found is freedom when it is found in the all-knowing Creator. Let the sense and the thoughts of the light shine upon us and let us not be covered by the darkness of pain that we may deeply praise Him. He is our Hiding Place, from our hidden places of ghosts and secrets that make us sick. In the light of the morn there is no shadow left to hide other than His and when the rays beat down we can emerge from the shadow days. His mercy crashes in and endures forever.

It’s easy to feel like a fraud when you understood the temptation to fill emotional needs through external attachments. The struggle is going through the very lesson you thought you knew so well, that you could avoid. Remember that struggle you go through is to pump healthy blood into the body of Christ. One blood courses through the veins of the one body and nourishes them all. If anything can comfort you is that your struggle is for the sake of many. For the church. St Paul’s heart of service was to suffer for the sake of the body. And even though we think we are strong, we are weak for the glory of God. God offers himself that way, life in place of death, holy desire replacing deceitful desire, life planted and growing and filling all the hollow of a soul. We are the weak ones, but this is not bad news. Isn’t brokenness the fertile ground for seeds of hope, the low place where Jesus meets us? We are the weak and we were made for hope and until we find our True Hope, there is no true strength; He renews the strength of those who hope in Him. God’s love is our hope. Keep your eyes on Him and if you can’t see His love fix your wandering eyes and bind it to Him once again.

May our afflictions, our seasons spent waiting patiently to be fixed and free be used to fix and free the body knowing that we have received comfort from the God of all comforts. May you be the unashamed comforter, held and put back together in His perfect love. There is nothing given away that Christ cannot retrieve from the abyss, for though we make our bed in hell, He is there too. He is always there, His eyes fixed on ours, placing our trembling hands on his own pulsing wounds so that we might believe Emmanuel – God with us. He never left.

“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.” Henri Nouwen

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3 NKJ)

Jesus is not stingy with His comfort, light or strength, especially when we ask. In stillness and quietness we forge an opening to the healing fire within.

As Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain said, “Unless we maintain contact with our inner depths, unless there is a still center in the midst of the storm, unless in the midst of all our activism we preserve a secret room in our heart where we can stand alone with God, we will lose all sense of direction and will be torn in pieces.”

“Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all” Nicole Krauss

You are loved