rescue.
The past month has brought with it more than I had imagined. More wonder, more feeling, more grief, and what I hope more healing. I feel like I have lived six months in six weeks, and the outworking of that has lead to a quiet unraveling and restoration over the past ten days. Earlier in the year, I remember saying how my body forgot the frame it once carried. The heaviness and weightiness of grief, and the stories that come from it. Now that I am back holding the frame, the nuance of what enters, somehow grows into a new challenge I did not imagine.
It’s almost as if I’ve leveled up on grief, and that life has said: “since you can hold this, now make room for more”. I find my weeks turn into an endless triage of people with the things that they carry deep down somehow revealing itself through conversation. It is not my space to engage in rescue, but far from it, to shape and build avenues where rescue can occur. Not by my own strength or wisdom, but by the One who is Higher. Yet I find my pride coming in the way and the wrestle of hyper-independence seeping its way through the cracks in my frame in wanting to be there at the end for everything and everyone. The recovering people pleaser in me is reverting to old scripts it promised itself it would not repeat.
Perhaps in my hubris I am thankful that my stamina is not what it used to be, and that I have had to put on my own oxygen mask and life jacket before assisting others. In that space, I have been met with the power of submission, surrender and repentance, not in what I can do, but what I can empower others to do instead, and to lift in ultimate surrender the things I do not and should not control. In that space, returns a gentle love wrapped in grace that we are all living life for the first time, and that courage comes not by trying hard, but trusting hard.
As December comes with an aching promise, I hold out hope in the joy and wonder of the rescue. Not of ourselves or for each other, but of salvation and the power in restoration. Sometimes the days need to be darker before we can see the sun again, but that does not mean the sun does not shine. The art of abiding in the rescue is trusting that the little good and intentionality we show in trying to make our circles a little bit better than when we once started, can be magnified through surrender, and that we hope not to achieve good for goodness sake, but we do good, because we have received it.