the graveyard's no place for a soul.

In the deepest sense- my heart knows how it feels to be alone. 

it knows how it feels to be lost in a valley.

it knows how it feels to be forgotten.

to be caught in a spiral of rushing thoughts and not able to come up for a breath. to be fighting so hard and clinging to lackluster hope that it can make it out of the current on its own. 

to be so scared to cry out for help and not knowing if there’s even someone on the other side of the current to help try and pull them out.

feeling helpless. feeling hopeless.

oh, God, if I didn’t know you… I can say with certainty that I would have given up and thrown in my towel far before now. 

because it was only when you found me that I met hope. it was only when I met you that I found a reason to keep living. 

because you found my lonely and outcast heart and wrapped it in the kind of love that went even to the point of dying for me. you told me that you wanted to be my friend. you told me that you see me as worthy of love that stays. 

I didn’t know what to make of it. your words of life and compassion began flowing through my veins and I began to breathe again. not those shallow, hurried breaths that had become my normal.

deep, slow, life-giving breaths. breaths that drew my heart away from panic and introduced it to rest. 

even now, I’m still learning to settle into and live in that rest. some days, I find myself unknowingly running back into the water that tried to drown me before. back into the racing thoughts, the lies of loneliness, the lack of hope.

but every time my flesh draws me back there, I quickly remember it is not where I am meant to be. it was my dwelling place when I was dead. a graveyard is no home for a living soul.

and as soon as I remember I cannot get out of that place on my own and look up, I can make out the shape of your hand on the other side of the water. and it is always reaching for me. waiting to pull me into your arms and hold me close as I slow my breath and you help to return my mind to truth. 

I am learning to claim the same truths that you have time and time again spoken over my soul. the more I listen to you speak them over me, the more confident my whisper grows in repeating them over myself. 

I still stumble. and more often than I want to admit, I fall. 

but I say with confidence that I am not in the same place I was anymore. my eyes are no longer veiled to believe that I am alone in this big, beautiful, scary, at times dark world. life has now been breathed into what was just a pile of dry bones void of hope.

my eyes have seen the light. His name is Jesus. He gives me real hope. and He’s never leaving me.