I’ve been quiet here for some years now.
Sometimes the quiet has come from pain.
Sometimes it was born from busyness and overwhelm.
Sometimes I kept quiet because I didn’t know what to say.
Sometimes, it’s been the fear of God that has held me silent, sometimes the fear of what others might think, sometimes the fear of handling all He’s given me to understand, sometimes the fear of never being able to make anyone else understand it.
I have held my peace because others I love have not held theirs.
And I have also held it because His still small voice asked me not to add my own voice to the roar.
But He’s been calling me back here to this blog, back to this ground that became holy when I invited Him into this space back when I began.
I’ve done so many things since I stopped sharing here in 2017 (maybe you’ve followed along a bit with the poet-photography-gone-entrepreneuring on Instagram, the fits-and-started Substack blog, or the few-and-far-between family updates on Facebook). I’ve become more myself than I was before, though it’s been a few years since I’ve believed most people who knew me when would recognize me now.
The grief and the growth have not been very palatable.
Yet God Himself has been faithful. To show up as Himself and who He says He is. To wrestle with me as He wrestled with Jacob and to love me like Hosea loved Gomer, to give me rest when I come to Him, to show me things He has done I could never have imagined.
I know I am free to stay silent here. I know I am safe with Him, whatever my process, whatever is happening in the world.
But my spirit is aching, and there is a fire in my soul that did not start with my pride or my knowledge or my dust that is weeping with so many many people He loves who have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.
When the Lord speaks out of the whirlwind, telling us to gird our loins, He’s got some very God perspective to lay on our human selves.
This is not a moment for victory marches. This is a moment to shut up and listen up, as Job did when God roared out of the whirlwind, daring him to compare himself to the God he thought he’d defined.
God who speaks out of the whirlwind is God who said that eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ whom He sent and tells people He loves that want into heaven to “depart from Me; I never knew you.”
This is God whose Kingdom is not of this world, this nation, or even this dimension, and we KNOW this.
He gives us grace upon grace and endless mercy in our blindness; He allows us to THINK and to FEEL and to CHOOSE.
But at the end of the day, He is GOD, not a scripted “gospel” or the right behind a movement or a good feeling that works for some nervous systems and blows up others. He is Himself — Creator, Savior, Judge, Avenger, Faithful, Love — in every single context, with every single person, and not one bit of God Himself depends on one bit of us ourselves.
If we know in our hearts we are His, our only answer to God Himself must be to acknowledge Him. That HE is the Lord, “exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness upon the earth.”
“I know that You can do everything,
And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You.
You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
Listen, please, and let me speak;
You said, ‘I will question you, and you shall answer Me.’
“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
Therefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.” [ Job 42:1-6 ]
Today, I know I am writing words no one is saying.
Today too many people are putting words in God’s mouth as Job’s friends did, claiming victory over enemies they’ve made of their neighbors instead of loving them as Jesus loved.
How dare we.
How dare we presume that we have defined Him? That we could?
May God have mercy. We know not what we do.