holding hands with grief.

I've been feeling a little bit lately like someone, or something, is in the room with me wherever I go. This presence is not menacing, it is not there to scare me or cause me harm. Rather, it sits and it watches, patiently waiting for me to take notice. There is no hand waiving or noise making. No effort to alert me or demand my attention.

But it is there.

And it remains with me, constantly. Like a small child who is used to being ignored but is waiting for the right moment, any moment, to be noticed, to be seen. It is constantly at my heels and hovers in the corner of every room I enter, and like an absentminded parent, I let it be seen without really seeing it at all.

I've come to recognize this companion as grief.

You see, we all experience grief whether we recognize it for what it is or not. Some therapists would argue that all therapy is really grief therapy, mourning the loss that has accompanied our suffering in even the smallest of ways. I have found this to be true, both in my own life as well as in the lives of my clients. We have all lost something, and will continue in this manner for the rest of our lives.

For some, they feel that the purpose of counseling is to be happy. I'm afraid this isn't so. For many, pain is as present as breathing, more common than not. Bodies are breaking. Violence is spreading. Humanity is familiar with the ache of despair and the echoing of injustice, the hollowness of loss and the seeming absence of a God who cares.

These clients come to therapy to be fixed, but in reality what they are really seeking is to be healed.

And in the same way, I want to see my grief as a problem to be solved. But I am learning that its presence in my life is not to bring me harm, but to bring me healing. If my heart feels like it's being smashed into a thousand pieces, that's because it is, and because it should be. If we are not allowing our eyes to see and our souls to feel the deep wounds that are being carved into humanity every day then we are not honoring ourselves or the people around us.

Grief lingers because it needs to be heard in order to bring about healing. 

Grief is waiting for my attention, and when I fully face it, when I sit down and say "I'm ready now" grief pauses, looks at me with knowing eyes, full of tenderness and firmly says:

I've been watching you for some time, the way you go about your day, the pauses you take when the feelings are trying to fight their way out, the busyness you wrap around yourself so that this doesn't happen. I see you in pain. I see the way you listen to those around you, the way your eyes meet those who are suffering for a moment and the familiarity of this emotion even as it passes you by. I see you welcome others but just as quickly push them out. I see your heart breaking a million times over for every person around you and I see you sink back into yourself when you feel your powerlessness is too much, I see you covering your eyes and your ears when you feel the burden is too great to carry. I see you holding in the bad and trying to scrape together good, little by little as if you could make something of it, anything of it, if you just try hard enough. I see you working to make yourself presentable to those around you, I see you striving so hard to be worthy, to be valuable, to be whole. I see the hate you feel and the pride you hold and the selfishness you use to keep yourself from having to be responsible, the chaos you make because you feel so much, so much, all the time and wished desperately that you didn't.

I see you.

And I have news.

I am here to hold your hand and help you through. I am here because you have not numbed yourself out, I am here for a reason. And you can run and you can hide and you can ignore me but I will be here waiting for you until you lend me your ear and listen. Because you are right, this world is a mess and you are too. But you must not, you cannot, stop there.

You see, my friend hope is also here. Also waiting, also sitting with you in the dark. And hope knows that there will be times of mourning, times where you think you will not be able to pick yourself up off the floor, times where you will believe that the next step is simply not possible, not even probable, given the circumstances. It will seem like there will never be light again.

But you see, grief cannot exist without light because grief expands into the darkness that light has left behind, it lets us know that something has died and that we need to honor this loss and respond.

Grief shows us where healing needs to begin.

So.

These days, I'm leaning into my grief, with hope, to better understand how to move forward. I'm listening to what grieves me in order to make space for healing, both in my own life and in the lives of those around me. I am recognizing that life will bring me many, many forms of sorrow, and that my purpose is not to tidily fix what is broken, but to grieve what has been lost.

In the words of Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning and Holocaust survivor, we "must not lose hope but should keep [our] courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle [does] not detract from its dignity and its meaning".

We will face losses, big and small, this much is certain.

Let grief come.

Invite her in. Respect her pain because it is meaningful. She may not always make sense and you may not always know how to respond but just start where you are because you can't go backwards and you can't skip ahead.

You can only hold her hand and say,

"I'm here. Go ahead. I'm listening."

curiosity and condemnation.

Life teaches us that relationships are about power. We learn this from a young age. Popularity has more to do with confidence than looks, though one can certainly influence the other.

Unfortunately, sometimes this confidence is bought by subtracting rather than adding. The world is full of those who gain esteem by lowering others, those who come into power because they are good at playing the game. Their comfort is directly correlated to the discomfort of the person they are with, their power gained from the powerlessness of those around them.

Personally, I don't believe that people set out to be cruel. Bullying, subtle or obvious, is a trait inherited in insecurity and confirmed by experience: we want the power because the power keeps us safe. Vulnerability is an intensely uncomfortable emotion and we will do anything to avoid it. Brené Brown's research on this topic was, not surprisingly, groundbreaking simply because she touched on something that so many of us feel and fear. Her work shows us over and over that vulnerability is a part of courage, not a sign of weakness.

But it doesn't come easily.

A fellow therapist and I were recently talking about relationships, and how often the discomfort we feel lends to premature self-destruction. Unanswered questions or feelings of powerlessness prompt us to force answers that cause us to decompose rather than advance. She said that when she feels this uneasiness she tries to look at the problem before her with curiosity rather than certainty, and asks herself a question:

Is the path to knowing dysfunctional?

Will stirring up a whirlwind of anxiety ridden questions rooted in control really get me the true answer I'm looking for? Is this something that can be solved overnight? Is gaining power in this situation actually harming myself and those around me?

Sometimes our impatience in vulnerability leads us to do things we are not proud of and almost always regret. Whether this is actively making someone feel bad or giving up in despair, the path to knowing in this way can only serve to isolate us even more. We gain a power that seems secure but is shallow, easily uprooted or stubbornly impassive. Both threaten our sense of belonging and wholeness.

I am learning that I must lean into the discomfort in both myself and others in order to unveil that which needs nurturing, that which needs pruning and a tender hand. When we choose condemnation over curiosity, we automatically shut a door that may have brought us light. When we aren't open to the process and just want the product, we miss out on the challenges that we need to grow into the people we are becoming.

I want to choose the path that is uncertain, insecure and vulnerable because it is only by being aware of and listening to these pieces of my being that I can properly heal. When I rush to cover up or scramble for power and control, I am laying the ground for dysfunction to take root and slowly poison my soul.

When we pass judgement on others, we pass judgement on ourselves.

And when we gain a sense of security from the insecurity of others, we dishonor our humanness and take away from that which allows us to connect.

And connection always breeds compassion.

We must be able to tolerate unpleasant emotions if we want to be whole. We must be willing to lower ourselves to the uneasiness of others, to meet them in their self-consciousness because we too, understand it. Because we too, are insecure, questioning our place and longing to be seen.

Is the path to knowing dysfunctional?

Can you tolerate the not knowing?

Can you be open to the process that will undoubtedly ask you to be vulnerable, and to connect to the vulnerability of others?

Can you choose curiosity over condemnation?

Because just one of those options leaves the possibility for more.

More life. More hope. More healing.

More love.

Be open to the process, no matter how difficult it may be.

Let your heart be rooted in kindness, not control.

It's the only way you'll grow.

arrhythmic love.

arrhythmic love.

He
was always always looking at her.
always guessing her expectations
never realizing
that to meet them
would require him to
be someone he
could never be.

She
afraid this was true never met his
weighted gaze. understanding that to
expect anything
meant an empty
aching that would prevent
her from being
someone she could.

Love
their love, limited one another.
it protected them from the truth
that they were mismatched
pieces of a
puzzle desperately
wanting to fit
even if it

Meant
never quite being whole.

space and grace.

Suffering has a way of silencing us, shrinking us down and making us smaller until we wish to no longer exist. Our ability to torment ourselves and perpetuate this pain is a universal disease that continues despite our circumstances. We do not need to be in hell to experience it within ourselves.

For those of us who struggle with mental illness, the battle is often unseen. Our brains lend themselves to self-deprecation freely and with no questions asked. What you may see on the surface is usually only the smallest indicator of what is going on underneath—our emotions have the capacity to bring us to the darkest place you can think of, and then a little further. It is no surprise to me that those of us who wrestle with our own demons become too tired to carry on. Living can take an extraordinary amount of work.

In my own life, I have been fortunate enough to have a patient therapist and a community of people who have allowed me the space to suffer freely. Medication also helped, and I have no shame associated with that which allowed me to heal when nothing else seemed to work. I have come so far from where I was just six years ago, and the hope I have experienced has been my anchor in seasons of despair. I am grateful that I was taught to lean into joy and peace in the smallest moments (thanks Shauna Niequist), because those memories have served as a reminder that goodness still exists when the ache in my soul tells me differently.

However, despite our emotional growth, we still have battles that seem to arise again and again. Pain that has not fully healed has a way of resurfacing, and I find this to be true not only in my own life but in the lives of those I work with as a therapist. Becoming whole, it turns out, is a lifelong process that we have the privilege of uncovering only a step at a time. This can be frustratingly heavy, and yet, this is what it means to be human—perfection escapes us this side of heaven, no matter how hard we try.

And yet, we keep on trying. The irony of this is that what we want for ourselves is often found in the opposite of doing, and nobody likes to hear that. We like being able to fix things, we like the idea that we can earn our keep and rebuild our tired bodies by running faster and farther than before. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard a client relay to me the extraordinary hurt they have experienced, only to finish the pain-filled telling with a solitary, resolved question:

“So, how do I fix it?”

I generally look back at them with a mirrored empathy, for I too am familiar with the particular yearning that comes from wanting desperately to be something other than what I am in the middle of my mess. But the gentle truth that has been relayed to me over and over is that healing can only come from acceptance, and that our struggle against ourselves only serves to imprison us even further. It is a beautiful paradox that wholeness can only come from picking up all pieces—how we put ourselves back together is up to us, but if we choose to leave out the difficult parts of our narrative we will never quite be able to make the pieces fit.

Recently, my sister introduced me to a healing practice called The Alexander Technique. I don’t fully understand it, but I know it has to do with the way in which we carry and move within our bodies, such as our posture. As she was examining the way I stand, she noticed that I tend to shrink into myself, moving everything inward and down until I am almost hunched over. To remedy this, she asked me to widen my shoulders. In response, I thrust my chest forward presumably to straighten my back and open up my shoulders. She shook her head at this and said,

 “No, not open. Widen.”

Sometimes, I think that this is the response that we have to healing. We are open to the process, but we must remain wide to really feel the effects. We ask for tools and read up on all the steps, and we apply them dutifully almost as if we are following a treatment plan. And it works.

For a little while.

But slowly and surely, we wither back into our suffering because we think that it is the truest reflection of ourselves. We very physically mirror our pain, and all the openness in the world does not change that because our openness must also be wide.

To me, wideness means that we are filling up space, that we are saying we are allowed to be in the room with everyone else. It says that we are OK with who we are and where we are at, and that those things do not denote or negate a seat at the table. It means that we are permitted to be in process, but that we are committed to believing we are capable of change.

Open says “can I come in?”

Wide says “can I stay?”

We often walk through the door but become frightened by our sense of belonging, we fight the feeling that it could be possible we are actually worthy.

One of the most powerful examples I have seen of being wide came from a former client.  She had lived most of her life small, trampled by the abuse of her family and internalizing the shame of her past. She wanted desperately to fix and forget, but was beginning to be open to the possibility that she was valuable even in the middle of her fragmented heart. I remember her telling me about how someone had said an offhanded comment to her, and how the words hurt her even though she knew that they were not intended to. She came in so excited one week because she had pulled that person aside and gently but courageously told him how and why she was bothered by that exchange. The person responded with such humility and respect, and thanked my client for being so open and honest about her feelings.

When my client told me this story, she was bursting with joy because she had finally been able to see and accept that she was worth speaking up for. She was open, yes, but she was also wide. She allowed herself to take up space and create a safe place for herself. She internalized self-compassion and love, without beating herself up or digging a hole of hate. She could have easily internalized the incident, blaming herself for being too sensitive or reasoning away the situation so as to avoid conflict.

But she didn’t.

She was wide, and in doing so, she found healing that took root in a soil that would not rot or erode away. She planted herself in worthiness because she was able to recognize that her wounds did not make her unworthy. They would heal, but she would have to let them, and to do that she would have to believe that she was worth the healing even when she was in pieces still.

You see, when we place all of our wholeness in being good or controlled or behaved or perfect, we really aren't planting ourselves anywhere healthy. The second that something or someone comes along and triggers us, and all those emotions come back up, the shame cycle starts again.

But when we can open ourselves up to grace and then let it widen our souls, it won't matter when we feel and fail and fall down and shatter again because we know that those pieces still belong to a whole being, they belong to a person who is growing and changing and learning to love all the parts that have brought her to where she is today.

When we are wide, we are honoring our pain and making space for our prosperity.

We are wishing ourselves well, even on our worst day, even when we feel like we don't deserve it.

And isn't that the point of grace after all?

To call the unworthy worthy?

To bring peace to those sitting in darkness?

To open up the doors and invite us in, and to ask us to please, please stay.

Because there's a seat at that table.

And no one else can fill it.

No one but you.

Don't make us wait until you have it all together...if you're anything like me, it'll be awhile.

Besides, you'll fit right in with the rest of us who don't know where we are going.

But we do know there will be grace.

So let it lift your head and ground your feet.

Your space will be waiting for you.

Don't waste any more time trying to earn it,

it's already yours.

forgiveness and belonging.

Loneliness kills. I don't say this to be dramatic, it's a scientific fact. According to the American Psychological Association, recent research has shown that being isolated presents a greater health risk than obesity, and can lead to an earlier mortality rate by 50%.

Being in community matters. 

We know this, as people. We were designed to be connected, to belong. It's one of our earliest longings, to be held and comforted by someone safe. We desperately want to hold on to this feeling. But somehow, as we get older, it becomes harder to grasp. 

We lose ourselves in the process of living. 

Maybe it was the pain of a broken relationship, or maybe you were the one doing the breaking. Maybe it was both. Regardless, we find our way to being alone by default or by choice, and allow the distance to numb us out until we no longer feel vulnerable. 

We protect ourselves from the inside out, and yet our souls are crushed by the heaviness of our armor.

And so we find that loneliness kills more than our bodies, but our spirits, long before it is our time.

I am finding for myself that forgiveness often precipitates belonging. Brené Brown states in her research that in order to belong to others, we must first belong to ourselves. Turns out that it's very hard to be open to acceptance from others when you cannot accept yourself. It's also extremely hard to be gracious towards others if you can't be gracious towards yourself. 

We must be champions of self-compassion.

If you are like me, you may think that the key to becoming a better person is to challenge and poke and prod and punish yourself in the right direction. So many things about American culture reinforce this, not to mention our sense of religious obligation. Many of us grew up in the rhetoric of the church that taught us very well how to be very ashamed, and emphasized a sort of spiritual self-masochism. 

I find this a dangerous dichotomy, this splitting of good self and bad self, this fear of our darkness and this lack of a genuine understanding of grace.

Listen, in order to love yourself, in order to accept who you are where you are, in order to find that belonging that you yearn for with every fiber of your being, you must understand that we are all capable of bad things.

Which means that you are also capable of good things.

Sometimes, I think, we get stuck feeling like we should just be good no matter what. We like to think that the world doesn't shape us, that all our pain and suffering doesn't go into what comes out of us, that we are OK despite the fact that very little in this life does not contain at least a sliver of ugliness.

But the truth is, we ALL have the capacity for both good and evil.

And beating ourselves up more, shoving our own faces in the dirt?

Punishing only leads to purgatory. 

So.

We must forgive. 

And part of forgiveness is acknowledging that we have done things we are not proud of.

It takes a lot of strength and a great deal of courage to look our demons in the face.

But more than this, it takes love.

We must we must we must be rooted in love to forgive, both ourselves and others.

We must know our own value, our own worthiness to truly stare down our darkness and take hold of the light. 

Grace requires that there be something to forgive.

And forgiveness can only be found when we tend to what has been broken, both inside and outside of us. 

We have made mistakes, yes.

We have damaged and destroyed and been promoters of our own self-harm.

I know it's scary to think you could be something different, something good. I know it feels untrue to believe that you aren't the sum of your shadows, that forgiveness feels like you are letting yourself off the hook for all the violent storms you've created.

I know. 

But grace, oh grace. Grace never starts with punishment. 

But it is capable of driving out fear.

Fear of ourselves, of others.

It's strongest in the face of adversity, failure, and shame. 

It can bring us out of isolation, if we let it.

It can propel us into belonging, but we have to let it in.

We have to acknowledge that our search for wholeness is directly linked to our ability to forgive ourselves, our ability to accept love in the places we feel the most unworthy, the most broken down. 

And to do that we have to face our pain. We have to recognize our own propensity for hurting.

And we have to allow ourselves to heal.

To take a deep breath, kneel down towards our suffering and say, 

"I forgive you. You are loved. This is not who you are, won't you come into the light?"

In my years of working as a social worker for men recovering from homelessness, the most successful clients I worked with were those who had a solid understanding of forgiveness in light of what they had done. Some had messed up in big ways like murder or violent crime, some in other ways like substance abuse or unhealthy relationships. And I will tell you, that the clients who had messed up the most were the ones who also loved the best because they had no choice but to face their struggle and forgive. Their lives literally depended on their ability to show compassion to themselves in the midst of their own suffering and the suffering they had caused. They knew that if they wanted to transform, it had to start with love, not hate. 

They had accepted that they had not been and would never be perfect, but loved themselves anyway.

We have all done and will continue to do bad things, yes.

It's human nature, after all.

But.

We don't have to stay there, and we don't have to keep reliving our own versions of hell.

Face it.

Forgive it.

And show yourself the compassion that God himself has shown you all this time.

Remind yourself of who you are despite of what you've done.

Because the truth is, all that kindness you are showing yourself? 

It multiplies as you open up to others.

We cannot belong to others until we belong to ourselves. 

And we cannot belong to ourselves until we forgive.

Don't waste another second of your precious living on imprisonment anymore.

The truth about who you are is waiting for you.

But you must be free to accept it. 

the good in goodbye.

You know when you’re watching a movie and one of the characters has been through it, and their life is in shambles and they’re talking to a complete stranger and their main sentiment is, “I never thought this would happen to me”?

Well, that’s pretty much been my life this year.

I really don’t think I’ve had my ass handed to me more than I have in the past 12 months. I found myself in a place I truly thought that I wouldn’t be, and that’s saying a lot since I tend to err on the depressing side of things. In other words, despite my knack for predicting and anticipating unfortunate occurrences, I managed to somehow still screw up the few things I thought I could never break—and man, I really never thought it would happen to me.

So, what did I do? Well, something else I was really good at:

I gave up.

Not at first though. At first I tried to figure it out and fix it and beat myself up and cry until I just felt nothing at all. Helpful tip for you—these options only work for a limited time and actually don’t move you to a better place. Wish I had known that, but I guess misery loves company, or maybe I just loved being miserable and didn’t want any company. It’s hard to say.

Either way, I did the whole angst thing for a while before I realized that I couldn’t actually fix all the things I had broken by continuing to try and fix myself. I guess I just thought that if I could just be better than my life would be better. And sometimes, I do think there are seasons when we are working on ourselves and problem solving and getting to the root of processing healing and growth. But for me, during this time, that didn’t seem to be working. Everywhere I looked, endings were happening despite my best efforts to bring things back to life.

Goodbyes became my new normal.

I think it’s no coincidence we call them goodbyes. It struck me as I was leaving one of the places that I loved most, a place where I really grew up: camp. I had been with this camp for almost ten years of my life. It’s where I spent my summers as a college student, and where I started my career as a professional counselor. It’s literally the reason I moved to NYC, to be closer to the kids and friends I had come to call family.

Camp was who I was.

But camp was ending. Adulthood had settled in and we were all moving on.

The goodbye was here to stay, whether I was ready or not.

If you were to talk to my camp friends, they would all tell you that I am notoriously bad at goodbyes. I would become despondent and sullen about a week before camp truly ended, because I was that sad to leave. So, imagine my extreme anxiety and panic at realizing, ten years later, that camp truly does have to end. I remember walking off camp grounds, remembering all the times I had said goodbye before, not knowing that I would still be standing on that very ground as a 28-year-old, professional counselor. And this time, truly saying goodbye because I had finally quit my job and decided to move forward with my life.

It was a bittersweet feeling, and here’s what I am learning—that good byes are in fact good. They signify growth and change, they signify new life. You cannot simultaneously hold on and let go, you have to do one or the other. And I was trying so hard to hold on, terrified of losing this community, of losing myself. Of not knowing what was ahead, if it would be as great as what was behind. Of not knowing who I was outside of this life I had created for myself.

In his book Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud speaks on goodbyes as a natural and healthy part of living. He says that oftentimes when we delay goodbyes, when we try to avoid endings, it can make us sick. We find ourselves stagnant and frustrated and incredibly unwell.

Boy did this sound familiar to me.

You see, I had been trying to go back and fix the problem, time and time again with no success. But the truth was, I could only solve it by moving forward. I needed to take the tools I had developed over the years, the lessons I had learned and the growth that had occurred and keep walking. Even if I didn’t know what I was walking towards, I needed to stop treading water because I was tired and it was slowly sucking up all my energy until I found myself physically drowning.

I needed to swim out of there.

And because God is gracious even when we are quite stubborn, a door opened at just the right opportunity. I got a new job—a new chance at living. It wasn’t easy, and it involved some risk—some not knowing, some change. And no matter who you are, change is scary.

But goodbyes, they can be good.

And no one ever started something new without having to leave something behind.

So. I’m embracing the goodbye. It doesn’t mean it isn’t painful, that it doesn’t involve grief. It is letting go of something that was sweet, after all. It lets us know that the thing we are leaving was powerful and meaningful enough to carry us to where we are today, and strong enough that it laid the foundation for us to do what we are still meant to do. It was in itself, good.

But its time has ended.

So say thank you.

Soak up the memories.

And swim towards new horizons.

It won’t be the last time you have to say goodbye.

But who knows what waits behind that next hello—

And what treasure you may find at the shore. 

punishment and parties.

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in West Harlem, four stops from my colorful and quirky apartment in the South Bronx, sipping a latte while watching the people of NYC zoom by. I have had three years in this brightly lit, never sleeping city. Three years where I have had the privilege of living out so many of the dreams that were on my shelf for so long--I've gotten to spend time with the people I love, people I never thought I would be just a five minute drive from. I've made new friends too, friends who have suffered with me through pain and danced alongside me in celebration, friends who have hunkered down with me through the seasons of life. I've worked harder than I thought possible, laughing real tears of joy and crying deep tears of sorrow with those I have come to call family. I've coached running teams with brave and fearless girls from the Bronx who have made me smile so big with pride I thought I would burst. I've gotten my clinical license, achieved professional certifications, and started a (small) private practice.

I have learned how to live in both plenty and in want.

I don't think it's possible that any more emotion could be packed into three years of living. There were days that I was so depressed that getting out of bed was a success, nights where anxiety badgered me mercilessly. I also experienced an alarming amount of anger, white hot rage that would pulse through me and make me think dark, dangerous thoughts. I became bitter for weeks, months at a time, a bitterness that demanded answers yet couldn't even get it together enough to formulate the questions. I flailed hard against the endless, random cruelty of living.

And yet, I got back up. I faced my demons and confronted the shadows that followed me everywhere.

I found out that many things were out of my control.

But I also found that some things were not.

I think that when we are faced with challenges, when obstacles block the way towards living, our instinct is to go back. Where did I go wrong? How did I get here? What could I have done differently? I have found that when hardship smacks me in the face I am quick to look at my faults, who often look like friendly ghosts. For me their names are depression, anxiety, fear, and shame. They like to pop in as often as possible just to let me know they're around in case I need them. And the truth is, at one time I did. At one time these unpleasant emotions were useful because they let me know that something was wrong and that I needed to pay attention to it. But after I did all the hard work, the years of therapy and dutifully taking my medication, I found that I often turned to them too quickly. I turned to them to tell me something about myself that they could not, something that they couldn't speak to because they had come as far as they could with me on the journey. They had brought me safely through the woods and it was time for them to send me off.

It is really scary thing to expect more of yourself after 28 years of self-deprecation.

And yet, this is where life and all its emotions had brought me--to a season of change that required me to, as my therapist put it, level up. It was time to apply everything I had learned and grown in, it was time to bloom.

You know what I thought to myself when I heard that?

What a relief.

There's a story about a son who is given his inheritance early and squanders it completely. He finds himself literally eating with the pigs and realizes that he royally screwed up, and that his only option was to return home. Like any disobedient boy, he expects to be in big trouble. His plan is to go to his father and beg for forgiveness, and even to ask to work as a servant in his house.

He expects to be punished.

But instead he gets a party.

He comes back and his father is so overwhelmingly overjoyed that he pulls off the most extravagant welcome home event of the century. He is treated like a prince and showed immense grace and love, far beyond what he deserved.

He expected to be punished but instead he got a party.

How often do I expect some bad thing, some terrible punishment to happen because of all the things I think that I deserve? How often do I make choices to stay in unhealthy situations because I'm afraid that I don't have enough grace to cover me, because I've failed over and over again and so I must not be valuable enough to receive something good?

How would my life look different if I looked for the party instead of the punishment?

Leveling up.

If I want more I have to expect more. If I want love and wholeness and freedom and hope I have to look for love and wholeness and freedom and hope.

I cannot keep looking to my shadows--they have already shown me the light.

I just have to walk towards it.

Embrace it.

Look for it in me and in the world around me.

So.

This is where I am at, in the tiniest cafe in the heart of this big city, the city of dreams.

The same dreams that brought me here will be the same ones that propel me forward because I now know what is possible.

I don't have to carry out my own punishment.

And I can't wait to see the party that's waiting for me yet.