The Texture of Life

There is a texture to life.

To a given day.

To how we approach it.

To how we exist within it.

If you are one of the few sensitive enough to feel it empathically, it is as a torrent of images — like a livestream of emotion in a bit stream, constantly moving ahead of you.

We sense it.

If you have ill intentions, we will feel uncomfortable for no discernible reason, and if we are not aware enough to remove ourselves from the situation, you take another step.

You interrupt us.

Hard stop.

This is where tragedy enters the picture.

It happens to stop us in our tracks.

I can only speak as one who has walked within these same fires — as one who empathizes intimately with despair.

Trust what I say: the God who spared my life when I tried to take it is able to spare yours, if you allow it.

I am saying that for me personally, tragedy has been the outcome of the times I ignored the urging of the Holy Spirit.

Specifically, near a score and five years on now — that car accident.

I nearly died.

Linda did.

The message I knew before You had to hard stop me?

Start listening.

Start talking.

Start breaking.

Start loving.

Stop pretending.

There it was.

I refused because of the hardness of my heart — the clay being over-fired in my upbringing having forged in me a brittleness.

It was an immovability, a stiffness of neck, as though I had forgotten that if we do not bend, we break.

Then tragedy on a winter morning.

Death, two: mine — who I was then, and the brittleness — and hers, because she was partially blind and couldn’t stop in the right spot.

I am not going to go into the details here again.

Some wounds must be allowed to remain in repose once healed.

The tragedy became the wound through which You reached Your scalpel and excised the demons I hid behind the doors of my soul.

You grasped my stony heart — the one absent blood, only dust on the inside — and massaged the soothing moisture of womanhood as both oil and salve.

To temper my wrath with compassion, my curses with tears, and my heart alive enough to feel love again.

Through the decades that have followed, You have kept the wound open and accessible, reaching within any time I need reminding — and then zipping it up behind You like a Houdini of the heart.

What I think even You might be shocked to know is that while You were raising the dead in my chest over here, You were also texturizing and familiarizing my incarnate being with Your distinct touch — Your flare.

I see that texture in this day.

Another one of Your many mercies indeed, huh?

I see it in the smiles of the people as they slide into my backseat, in the shy hellos from those stepping out of their comfort zones even in replying.

I even see it in the macho gym bros when I hit chest day — the glimmer of You in every eye.

The possibility for it, at least.

If we but bless ourselves and others with the humility to put the mirror down and lift prayers instead of selfies.

Let us invest into eternity and try like hell to leave no evidence behind us of our individual names — in an effort, Beloved, to raise a universal, global, unified, no-denomination, no-language-barrier praise to heaven.

To glorify the Name.

Love Incarnate.

Yeshua.

He draws near.

Sincerely,

Dust