What are you carrying?

For when something in your life feels unformed and stuck, waiting on you to speak it into being.

For when you are fixated on the one no in your life and blind to the whole garden of yes around it.

For when a boundary starts to feel like a cage, and getting what you wanted left you more exposed, not less.

For when your best effort falls flat while someone else’s is received, and resentment is crouching at the door.

For when you are raging at the limits you never chose, and need to know you are grieved over, not raged at.

For the long wait after the worst is over, when you are past the disaster and still cannot step out of it, watching for ground dry enough to stand on.

For when you are handed a fresh start that is not a return to how things were.

For when you are building something tall mostly so your name will outlast you.

For when you are asked to leave something settled for a promise you cannot yet see.

For when every fact in front of you contradicts the thing you were told to trust.

For when the waiting became unbearable and you grasped, or when you are the one overlooked in someone else’s plan.

For the tired, private laugh at a hope you have stopped letting yourself believe.

For when the crowd wants to make the outsider pay, and for what you cannot stop looking back at.

For when a long-deferred hope finally arrives, and for who got pushed to the margins so it could.

For when the thing you love most is the thing at risk, and there is no good answer to give.

For the rivalry you were born into, and the cold trade of something lasting for something you wanted right now.

For wanting a blessing badly enough to take it by a means you would rather not name, and for the cry of the one who arrived too late.

For the night you are running from what you did, bedded down in the bleakest place, and find you were not as alone as you were sure.

For the ache of performing for a love that will not come, and the strange justice of being deceived the way you once deceived.

For the night before the thing you dread, holding on to God in the dark and refusing to let go unblessed, even if it leaves you marked.

For the dread of facing someone you wronged, and the grace of being met with open arms when you braced for the blow.

For when your pain is taken up as everyone else’s cause, spoken for so loudly that you vanish from your own story.

For betrayal by your own people, and the silence of heaven in the worst stretch, when the thing you dreaded happens and no voice explains it.

For being owed something by someone with power over you, with no clean way to claim it, and the vindication of the one written out of the story.

For doing the right thing and being punished for it, and the question of whether God is with you when integrity costs you everything.

For the difference between being healed of a hard season and being made, somehow, fruitful inside it.

For old guilt resurfacing under pressure, and the cost of stepping into the gap for someone you love.

For holding a real betrayal honestly and still refusing to let it be the only thing your life is allowed to mean.

For something someone meant for your harm, and the slow work of trusting it is not the last word without pretending it was not real.

For the work underneath your life that someone else is doing, and for the small refusals available to people with no power at all.

For the long stretch where nothing moves and you are keeping someone else’s sheep, and for belonging nowhere while you wait.

For being asked to do something beyond you, and getting no answer to who am I, only the promise that God will be with you.

For when you did the thing you believed you were asked to do and it made everything worse, and you want to say so out loud.

For the refusal you have repeated so often it has set into character, and for the cost a rescue can carry that nobody wants to look at.

For what you inherited that somebody else paid for, and for holding the freedom and its cost in the same hand.

For the place where going back looks reasonable, going forward looks impossible, and standing still is unbearable.

For the far side of something you could not see a way past, and for words to say about it that also point at what is still ahead.

For the short interval between relief and the next need, when the last rescue turns out not to cover this one.

For what you are storing that was given for a day, and for the fear underneath the storing.

For the anger that is really the question of whether God is here, and for needing someone to hold your arms up.

For the thing about how you work that you cannot see and an outsider would name in a day.

For saying yes before you knew the terms, and for wanting an encounter without quite wanting what an encounter would be like.

For wanting to know what is actually being asked of you, and for the part of you that resents being told at all.

For the page of the Bible you would rather was not there, and for the price a system quietly puts on a person.

For an ethic built out of what you have been rather than what you believe, and for who gets to rest because of how you arrange your week.

For the agreements you could not later claim you had not entered, and for eating in the presence of something you were told not to touch.

For wanting presence rather than a visit, and for the unseen tending that keeps a light going through the night.

For carrying other people's names into the room with you, and for the skill in your hands being a gift rather than an achievement.

For what you built for yourself while the waiting went on too long, and the account of it you gave afterward.

For being offered everything you asked for except the presence you actually wanted, and for asking to be shown rather than accompanied.

For a second chance that comes with the same terms rather than easier ones, and for what has changed in you that you cannot see.

For the same energy pointed somewhere better after it went badly wrong, and for guidance that only ever tells you about today.

For the part after the funeral, when people ask how you are and the true answer will not fit in the street.

For the first ordinary day of work after everything changed, and for being noticed by someone who did not have to.

For the night you have to ask for something you cannot demand, from someone free to say no.

For the new thing that is not the old thing returned, and for work whose point you may never get to see.

For the summons that does not argue with you, and what it asks you to put down before you understand why.

For the thing about you that you long ago decided you deserved, and stopped asking about.

For being the person at the table nobody approves of, and for a rule enforced on you by someone who has stopped asking what it is for.

For when the people who have known you longest treat what you are doing now as a symptom.

For work that mostly does not take, and for the delay you have started reading as indifference.

For being the one everybody stopped trying to help, and for taking what you needed without permission.

For being unhearable to the people who knew you first, and for going along with something because backing out would cost you face.

For the line you keep between the people who count and the people who are an exception.

For having been shown a thing more than once and still starting the arithmetic from nothing.

For getting the answer right and the meaning wrong, and for what you would still be seen doing if it cost you.

For saying the true thing rather than the confident thing, and not being corrected for it.

For the one thing your life is arranged around that you would rather was left out of the question.

For the thing you stopped asking for out loud because people around you were embarrassed by it.

For the thing in full leaf that is bearing nothing, and for the difference between losing your temper and having already looked.

For the question with no safe answer, and for the widow paying into a building that is coming down.

For wanting a date, or a sign, or anything that would let you stop holding it open.

For the prayer that is not answered, and for getting up and going anyway.

For the thing you let pass because saying otherwise would have made the room difficult.

For dying with the question still open, and for the one person who could see it being the one who did it.

For being handed something to say, and so far saying nothing to anyone.

For the thing you are still hoping to think your way out of, and for the fear that none of it stays.

For work that will outlast your control of it, and the refusal to enjoy it until you know it lasts.

For a hard stretch nobody can tell you the length of, and the day in front of you meanwhile.

For carrying something alone that you have quietly filed under strength.

For the enjoyment you have been postponing until you feel you have earned it.

For the life you keep comparing this one to, and the damage the comparison is doing.

For the arrangement that has not paid out, and the fact that you have not said so out loud.

For somebody else's confident account of your life, which never quite fitted.

For everything you have been holding off on until the situation resolves.

For the small thing you have left blunt because the big things are handled.

For acting without the information that would have settled it, and for the house quietly running down.

For the summary of your life that is accurate and still does not describe it.