Can you describe what you're feeling in these moments?

A sense of failure and impending failure so complete that it cannot be moved...Better to walk in circles, go to sleep, sleep myself to oblivion. All the things I did not accomplish, all that I did but didn't do well. The gust of wind that carries them swirls up inside of me. This is anxiety. Anxiety is not "being worried." It is being sat upon by a large elephant.

I was reaching for something helpful, something peaceful, something inspiring as I went to sleep that night. And as I was drifting off, I had a half waking thought journey, snippets of a story or poem or something. They made perfect sense to me as I traveled through them, but in the morning, all I could remember is one line. "Sky, stay sky."

Sky, stay sky. Don't change, be the same, sky. Stay.

I'm learning, in my thirties, that I will not ever be the sort of consistent person who churns out posts and articles without fail. It is not my nature. I am not an unflinching woman. I set my face like flint, but then it begins to wobble and melt in the rain. I will possibly never even have the strong stem that I desire, the strong rose stem covered in thorns. Protected. Safe. I will always be bendable. A daisy. Accepting it helps.

I am changeable and inconsistent. This is my nature, all of ours, to some extent.
But God is with us, unchangeable.

God, unchangeable, unshakeable, immovable, unruffled, not panicking. Jesus, never unloving, not moody, not shaking, not afraid. God moves into me and lives within me. But the distinction never changes, God is God and I am I. I don't become Him, I don't change him.

So unchangeable God burns within changeable me.
Whether I feel it or not, whether I remember or not, there He is, perfect and good and always the same. Never untrue.

I can rest in it. After all, I occupy my own little restless universe, but the real world, the universe with planets and systems beyond my knowledge continues on despite me.

Sky, stay sky. I'll lie on my back in the grass. Dreaming, just watching. The heavy blue, the haze. Planets glowing, stars in the distance.

I'll wait for the wave to smooth itself into ripples, rest in the shallows, wait for the next wave.

Genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. . . We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.  (Paul Tillich; source: http://www.betterworld.net)

No can ever tell me that prayers don't get answered. It has been almost a decade but this November, one of my most precious prayers regarding reconciliation and reunion has come to pass. 

It has been a long journey and definitely a painful one. 

When you are estranged from a loved one, the world, even if everything is going well and you are showered with more blessings you can account for, is lacking in a way that is indescribable. A great big scribble across the page of every chapter in your life that you live from the moment of that departure. 

The landscape of forgiveness is a long and strange place. For me the first terrain to cross was finding the courage to ask for forgiveness, the second was to forgive myself, and now after a length of time that cannot possibly be determined at the onset, is the place where the forgiveness sought is finally given and this is where the rubber meets the road. It is where you truly find out if you really did the work necessary to accept all of the beautiful grace waiting for you in this very moment. Because it is possible that you did "just enough" to help you feel comfortable and "justified" but not all that is required to be truly humbled and transformed by the experience. You haven't really come to the full understanding of how much lacking that person in your life has harmed you and how much you have harmed them. And even more importantly, how much you don't deserve to have them back in your life.

That is what grace truly is. It is a gift that is given to you that you absolutely do not deserve. 

Someone once told me that sometimes reconciliation isn't possible because one side may have tried in their own way to reach out but got burned way too many times so reaching out again now seems useless and so they just...give up. It sounds right but it's actually really wrong because it is not rooted in love. It is rooted in pride. You're still seeking out your own glorification and don't really care about understanding what the other person may be going through. 

I would be a liar if I said I didn't have this same feeling at many points over the years but call it determination or masochism,  something or someone in my life would always come just in time to encourage me to keep the door open.

I think also, at the very heart of it, I truly longed for an end to the estrangement and the chance for a "do over."  And so I guess what it comes down to, simple and plain, is the desire to love that person again and to be a part of each other's lives again. 

Loving the people God has blessed our lives with is not easy. If it was, God wouldn't have had to define and describe what real love is supposed to be and look like so that we could have something to refer to. Our hearts are very fickle and more apt to seek out offense rather than to seek understanding. It is a lot easier to say "forget you!" than to say "let's work this out". No matter how ugly or difficult or uncomfortable; let's work through it so we can rise above it. 

And just because I have been given this precious moment of reconciliation, doesn't mean that the work is over. There is still "strangeness" here. It's a clumsy new dance that I don't know the choreography to and right now, I think we're just playing it by ear.

The biggest change?

We are handling each other more gently and with the common goal of seeking first to understand as opposed to being first understood.