STOP

I wrote in my journal during Sharon Garlough Brown’s online retreat, that I am so thankful for this time to STOP.

I have been aimless, scurrying, confused, irritable, restless, depleted, weary, anxious, and distracted.

I have been overeating, overthinking, and overdoing, longing, yearning, failing, flailing, stumbling, falling, falling, falling.

I have been spinning, turning, changing, suppressing, digging, retreating, running, relying, seeking, avoiding, hushing, yelling, tumbling.

Everything…but STOPPING.

Like I have been breathlessly and aimlessly running–no particular goal in sight. Until…I hit a wall, a blessed wall, where everything piled up in me and behind me and led me here–to a hard STOP.

Art by Emma Chang, 對話 – 對畫 Dialogue with Art (FB)

Now, I can stop and slowly turn around and SEE. And take a breath. A deep breath. Another deep breath. Do you feel it? Do you see it? The whole world is there, crying out, longing, yelling, falling, and running.

Confusion swirling in and around us all. We are connected by the crazy.

We all need the gift of a wall standing in our way–a dead end to the endless rumblings–STOP. Turn around and SEE.

The world is as it has always been. Broken. Hurting. Crying out. Helpless and Torn. We feel it. We know it. But on a level we may never have before.

We couldn’t then. And we can’t now. Not much has changed. But this time–we hit a wall that made us STOP and SEE. Things aren’t as they seem. They are less. They are more. They are so much more.

We need to STOP. LISTEN. To our own breathing and the beat of our own hearts. The pain resurfacing. The trauma returning. The fears plaguing. It’s time to turn and face them in ourselves. In others. In the world.

This is our reality. We cannot escape it. He is God. And we are not. He is LOVE here and now and forever. It’s time, once again, to let Him root out, restore, unleash, recover, refine, dig up, return, heal, revive, and resurrect.

There is no one, not one, that has the power to open our own eyes to truly SEE, truly HEAR, truly LOVE besides the One who stands before us–a fortress that rises out of the dust to save us from ourselves–because of His great and perfect LOVE.

Psalm 130.

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