Divine Whispers

Jan - July 2025 Wandering Archive

God Speaks in the Stillness 

Today I am sick. I fell acutely so on Sunday and have been mitigating discomfort since. It's just a cold, but when you're used to walking, it can be a bit of an adjustment.

But I'm not really upset about it, it's been a while since I've caught something and in some ways I realise now that I was starting to miss some time with God. Last week I was so excited about so many new things that my prayer life was just little bursts of thanks and praise at various points, but the intimacy was not there. So when I finally realised this was a great opportunity to relax into something like that again, though I didn't expect anything, I was also not disappointed. 

I often joked in the past that God called me in dreams because the only time he could get was when I was sleeping, but I think there's a lot of truth to it. In the same way that so many mystics spoke to God only during or after a debilitating struggle with illness. I think for some of us, it's only in this period of vulnerability, weakness, and surrender that we are able to hear properly what is always there around us. 

Sometimes God is not in the earthquake, or in the wind, God is in the dark, and the quiet.

 

The Unnamed and the Named 

This morning, I awoke with a thought woven from memory and wonder: As a child, I'd woken up in my grandmother's house at some point in the night, sometime before I would later become plagued with nightmares or visions in the dark. It was simply black. It was quiet. I stood up, hardly the height of any table of counter in the kitchen as I passed, and there was no agency or fear, or even thoughts. I felt fully secure as I stood in the kitchen that if, for some reason I did need something, I could simply call her name, and she would be there. This was not a conscious thought, either, it was a knowledge in my soul. A truth that had yet to be tested or shaken, because in my mind there had not yet even been some differentiation between safety and danger.

And that was it. 

A child does not name what has never felt separate. The mother is not other but part of the very fabric of being. Her love is like air, unnoticed until absent. The father, encountered first as other, becomes defined by presence: to be seen, to be known, to be chosen.

How devastating it is, then, to feel unworthy of the father’s gaze or adrift in the absence of the mother’s touch. These are wounds etched into the soul’s deepest folds, whispering lies about worth and belonging.

But God’s love is the great mender of these threads. Not merely a mixture of mother and father, presence and absence, but the very loom on which all love is woven. In God, there is no absence deep enough to undo the belonging, no gaze turned away that can unmake our being.

Christ stands as both embrace and breath: the Father’s “You are My beloved” and the Spirit’s “You are within Me, and I within you.” The Gospel, that Good News, is not just that we are found, but that we were never truly lost... only asleep to the love that never left.

Today, I walk with this truth: I am not held because I strive; I strive because I am held. And even in my striving, even in my forgetting, I was never outside the circle of God’s heart. How many of us think we have to reach for God somewhere other, when we are already in our father's house?

To love is to be, and to be is to be loved.

 

Acts of Creation

Creation feels like a compulsion not unlike longing. A longing for definition that reveals rather than confines. Creation draws something from the formless, from the realm of all-potential, and offers it shape. And yes, in doing so, it introduces flaw and limitation, but only in that limitation can connection become possible. For beings like us, there can be no relationship with the undefined and limitless unless it is to take some form, like us, to be touched... however briefly. 

And in it there is a quiet ecstasy... a joy not rooted in production or outcome, but in communion between the limitless, the vessel, and what is being born. Whether sculptor, writer, gardener, or healer, we are that vessel through which something that once was not, enters the world that is, and becomes something not entirely ours, but shared.

And this is not so different from how meaning moves in the rest of our lives, too. There are certain milestones that the world knows how to celebrate, like birth, marriage, promotion, and retirement. But in our broken world these are not sacred in and of themselves-- they are containers. What fills them depends on the presence, the depth, the surrender we bring. Sex can be an initiation into divine mystery, or a transaction. Childbirth can be a moving event, or simply a medical one. A wedding may celebrate deep union between beloved souls, or merely mark legal status. What matters is not the event, but how we meet it. The reverence we carry. The joy we allow. The shape we are willing to give to love, to grief, to beauty, to longing.

The same outer form can hold vastly different truths, depending on the soul behind it.

Life is full of milestones, with or without fanfare. But it is all just clay, without Spirit. 

 

On Rest and Drawings 

I have walked long and far, and today, I do not walk at all.

This morning, I set aside a burden—not the weight upon my back, but the weight within my mind. For too many miles, I have carried an obligation I did not love, simply because it felt unthinkable to lay it down. What does it mean to step away from something I once called necessary? Am I lesser for it? Weaker? No. The road does not mourn when a traveler turns onto a different path. It simply continues, as do I.

And so, I rest.

Not the restless kind of stillness, where the mind itches for motion and the hands seek something to hold. No, I choose to rest fully, to sit with the wind and the quiet hum of the earth beneath me. My thoughts do not need to be wrung dry today. I have spent too many hours in the work of unraveling and mending them. Let them simply be.

Instead, I draw.

It is a strange thing, this act of placing ink to parchment, of letting the hand shape something before the mind has finished deciding what it is. At least, with this sort of drawing. I am not creating in some ways, as much as that is another form of witnessing. The lines emerge like a stream finding its own course, like footprints pressed into soft soil, revealing a path I did not know was there. I do not command them. I follow them. 

The road stretches ahead of me, but today it does not call my name. There is still much to be done, many steps yet to be taken. But today, the only motion I need is the slow, steady sweep of my hand across the page, and the quiet, patient breath of the world as it keeps turning, without needing me to chase it.

I have walked long and far. Today, I do not walk at all. And yet, somehow, I have still arrived somewhere new.

Not Just Broken 

I don't need another mark, another token, or some new record... I just need to sit. To be told by my current state of freedom and growth that I where I have struggled it has been for the right purposes. To be reminded that when given a choice, I made the right one, and that since then I have come out of my darkness stronger.

 

I now live as a composite creature... in the world but not of the world; half me, half love I have shared and been shown, and sewn together with God's gold. I am as a dead woman, animated not by her own will but by the Spirit who refused to let her lie in the grave... now aching to bring love and beauty to a world in peril of losing its own soul. To speak love... and to become it, to the best of my ability. 

There is nothing more to prove, or reach for, only surrender to becoming.
Again and again I have been broken, and again and again it is His hand, not mine, that swept up the pieces. Again and again, though, I have been remade-- not patched, or repaired, but something more than I was before the last break. Something reforged, and more wholly His. 
I was broken, but I did not stay broken.I was dead, but I did not stay dead.Because God was not done with me. 
And there is much to do. 

  

A River without Hurry 

The river carries me, and I do not resist. Not because I cannot, not because I am bound, but because there is no need. It moves, and I move with it. It bends where it bends, widens where it widens, and I do not ask where it goes. Not because I am indifferent, but because I trust the course.

I have wondered before if I could prepare for what lies ahead, if I could shape myself into something ready, something expectant. But readiness, I have learned, is not a thing to be gathered. it is something to be grown into. And I do not yet need to be ready for what has not yet come.

There was a time when this would have driven me mad. A younger version of me-- hungry, restless, desperate for clarity-- would have searched the waters for glimpses of the future, would have fought the current just to prove that I could. But I do not ask the river to rush. The concept of rushing does not even exist here.

There is only the unfolding, and the unfolding is assured. 

I have felt something take root deep within me, something planted long ago but only now meeting the soil. There is no need to pull at it, to demand it bloom before its time. I know now that whatever is coming will arrive in its own way, at its own pace, and that when I meet it, I will be as I need to be... simply because I have arrived.

And yet, I do not mistake this for arrival, either. This is not an ending, not even a destination. It is merely the next passage, the next stretch of water, the next way of continuing. There is more, much more, further down the river. And it will matter immensely. But for now, I rest in the knowing that I do not need to know.

The river moves. And so do I.

Being and Seeking 

There are things I cannot control. No matter how carefully I think, or how much work I do to refine my understanding, I cannot control how others perceive me. They will sort, categorize, and assume... because it is easier than seeing. Because it is easier than listening.

This is part of my human limitations. I can show who I am, but that only matters if someone chooses to look. And I cannot make them look. And when or if they do, I cannot control what they choose to see.

And I hesitated to even note this here, because it felt like some sort of whining, but I bring this up because I wondered if maybe this is applies to God, too. Not the limitations, but ours. We try so hard to define God-- to put Him into a framework, to quantify, to fit Him into our existing categories. But are we even asking the right questions? Are we looking for Him in places where He can be found? Or are we so fixated on the framework itself that we fail to see what it was meant to reveal?

This is why I reject the idea that identity alone dictates wisdom. A person’s background may give them unique insight, but it does not define or determine whether they understand something truly. Two people from the same place can walk away with opposite lessons. Two people with the same struggle can emerge with opposite conclusions. Lived experience can illuminate, but it can also mislead. The only thing that matters is whether we are moving toward what is true.

And truth… truth is not something that shifts based on where you stand. If truth is real, then it must be something beyond perspective... beyond background, beyond identity, beyond the stories we tell ourselves.

 

A Taste of Spring

AH! At last, at last!! The air is thick with something unseen. As it was in my dream, so it was this morning -- the spring rain has arrived. Just the hints of it, the taste I thought I had lost is in the air.

Something stirs... something beyond myself. It is not longing, not sorrow. It is a whisper of green, the first breath of spring breaking the frost. A murmur at the edges of my heart that winter is ending soon. That something is about to begin.

I do not know what this new thing is.

And I wonder... In my ignorance, will I thwart it? Will I hesitate at the threshold? Will I refuse to step forward for no reason but my own foolishness? Will my foolishness be the key, even?

Is some new skin not meant to be formed first, or formed around me as I step into it?

I sit with this thought as the world moves. Today, time rushes forward with its endless demands, whispering of all the things I could do, all the things I should do. My hands reach for everything, but I know I can only hold so much.

So, I return to the center:

I know who I am. I know Whose I am. And though I have not yet stepped into the fullness of it, though the new skin has not yet settled, I trust.

A Gentle Settling

 

Quiet is not empty, not barren... simply itself. Quiet. 

The path I walk is a path worn by many feet before mine, yet new beneath each step I take. Somewhere ahead, unseen but present, the road continues beyond my sight. There is no urgency in my steps, no rushing toward an unseen destination, only the rhythm of movement itself. I do not know exactly where this path leads, only that I am upon it, and that is enough for now.

There was a time when I might have called this waiting. But I see now that it is something else. This is not a pause. This is not an exile. This is the breath between one thing and the next, the sacred space where the heart does not strive, but neither does it sleep. It is the stillness of morning before the sun fully rises, the hush of the world when snow has just fallen. It is not absence; it is fullness unhurried.

The love I carry with me has become the seed of something else... something deeper, something steady. It is not an unshakable stone, nor a weight I must bear, but something softer: a dandelion gone to seed, still deeply rooted while the past season's glory is carried onward by the wind, scattering in ways I cannot predict. I am not bound by longing, nor am I untouched by it. I carry it with me, but lighter now, as a traveler carries a well-worn token. A reminder. 

There was a temptation to name this road before I walked it-- to say, "this is the path of solitude," or "this is the way of renunciation." But I resist that temptation, because I see now that I do not yet know. I see that even as I let go there are those who still find their place beside me. This is new. Perhaps this, then, is still a road to something I cannot yet see. Perhaps it is a path of tending, rather than turning away. 

I do not shut my heart away. I do not renounce the possibility of surprise. But I also cannot grasp at shadows. If love should come for me, it will not be summoned by sorrow, nor by lack. It will come if it is meant to, and I will not need to chase it. Until then, I remain here, walking, trusting, learning what it means to be enough—to hold peace in my own hands without waiting for another to place it there.

More thought is needed. More walking.

In any event... I now feel a quiet strength that tells me I am whole, as I walk with God, and this means that I can walk freely into a future where love can be itself, without some comparative lack, without need, and entirely for its own sake. 

Planted by the River 

Lately, I have been thinking about what it means to step fully into one’s own life, and become what God would have us be, through our own unique expressions of His image. How easy it is to let the world shape us into something smaller, something quieter... But I have come to realize that we are not meant to be shadows of ourselves. We are meant to be light on a hill, to love openly. And I am learning that the only permission I ever needed to do that was my own.

There was a time when I thought life was about obligation. About being what was expected, about making the safest choices, about pleasing those who demanded the most from me. But I am learning that life is more than that. We are allowed to be more. God gave us free will, to step toward the things of beauty and meaning in this life, without apology.

Time does not pause while we hesitate. It moves, whether we are ready or not. We tell ourselves, "One day..." but the longer we wait, the more we forget what it even felt like to dream.

And I see it now, in others, too... the ones who have carried so much for so long that they have forgotten they were meant to stand tall, not just endure. The ones who have mistaken love for captivity, or devotion for disappearance. And I wonder if they have ever stopped to realize that they, too, deserve to be held. That it is only in God that we are made whole, not through the approval of others.

Because there is a deep, sacred beauty in the idea of self-sacrifice for the people we love. But true sacrifice is offered, not demanded. It is given freely, not taken by force. And it is meant to serve something higher -- the life, love, the flourishing of both love and beloved. When suffering is shared, when pain is woven into a life of mutual devotion, that is one thing. But when giving becomes emptying, when sacrifice leaves only absence... then that is not the way love was meant to be. 

We are not less worthy of love simply because we choose to live. A tree planted by the water does not ask if it deserves to grow; it simply stretches toward the sky. Whatever we tell ourselves about what we might be worth, what we might have done, or what we might deserve, it is never dehumanization.

True love mutually delights in the expansion and becoming of the beloved... mutually fosters, nurtures, and expands. Love builds, love restores. It flows, it inspires, it emboldens. It creates.

Real love doesn’t ask us to die. Love may inspire us to be willing to perform such extremes, but it also asks, what gives us the strength to live? Who or what reminds us that we were never meant to disappear? Reminds us of, or inspires us to be and become, who we really are?

 

Walk, and Spread Seeds 

It seems to me that the Zen Buddhist saying "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" makes more sense the closer one gets to true surrender to the journey. Not surrender in the white-flag sense, but the kind that comes from finally finding one's state of heart where the fine details of the world around you simply carry less weight, because what you do carry is meaningful, light, and even energizing in a steady, gentle way. 

Some years ago I would never have guessed that I would be on this journey. And though I am certainly far from enlightenment, I can hear the whispers of its promise when I am at my best... That continued movement without striving, the faith that there is a plan, a purpose, and that what I am is enough.

I have often pushed back against the idea of being "enough," because to someone like me it has always sounded like defeat and stagnation. Who am I, if not striving? But I think that's where the secret lies -- that in letting go of our clawing, it doesn't mean a letting go of growth. One cannot quicken the passage of time, or progression of those bound to it. 

All we can do is tend the soil of our hearts and souls, keeping it healthy and receptive to the seeds of the crops we wish to grow, and God does the rest. 

After the Breech 

Messes can be so stressful, but I find the worst ones to be kind of... exciting. At this point, I feel like I can get through anything, whether I like it or not. I'm not a fainter, even though at times I wished I was. There were times where I knew that some new world or something I wanted or needed were on the other side of what seemed like unsurmountable pain... but now I see that the difference between anxiety and excitement is simply how much one feels like they can yet succeed. 

There are things I can't do, of course. Plenty. But these are not in my current trajectory. I can see it more clearly now; where I need to go. And though I have been born breech, desperately trying to hold on to my once home, God has pulled me out into the world only for me to realise that I am free now, and that all that I am meant to carry with me is in my person... in my new soul. 

I may have to fight, or to endure again, but whatever it is I am meant to do, it cannot even be stopped by me, because it, too, was never mine to begin with, but part of something bigger that I can't let down. 

Look on Him, and Despair

When I had not yet lived, there was a time when I lived for Love. I sought it with reckless abandon, gave it without limit, and believed it to be the highest and most sacred thing. I held nothing back, convinced that if I could only love fully enough, truly enough, it would answer every longing and heal every wound.

There was a time when I lived for Truth. I chased it wherever it led, unafraid of what I might find, unwilling to settle for anything less than what was real. I believed knowledge would bring clarity, that understanding would bring freedom. And so, I pursued it with the same fervor I had given to Love--completely, unrelentingly.

But Love, without God, is a chasm. It does not fill; it consumes. It becomes an endless outpouring, with no source to replenish it. And Truth, without God, is an abyss. It does not enlighten; it fractures. It becomes a weight too great to bear, a tide that pulls the soul into despair.

I loved until I was emptied. I sought truth until I was lost. And in the end, when I had given everything, when I had nothing left, I nearly died for these Idols.

And that is when He caught me.

I do not think God rebuked me for how I loved. I do not think He chastised me for how I sought Truth. I think He saw a heart willing to give everything for what it believed was good, and so He showed me something better. Not a lesser love, but the source of love. Not a softer truth, but the foundation of truth.

And now, I see. Not only was I saved from destruction, but I was not asked to cast away what I had been. The passion remains. The hunger remains. The relentless pursuit of what is real, remains. But they are no longer gods of their own making. They are no longer consuming me. They have been not just purified, but full revealed in Him.

What I sought before was only a shadow. But now, I have found the light.

  

Shining Waters 

Christians spend all too little time speaking about God's kingdom among us. I feel like there's something to be said about heaven, though -- the kingdom fully revealed. 

I do also occasionally take comfort thinking that someday I might be able to be reunited with people I have been parted from in life, and I imagine that this feeling will only grow with time, and further loss. There is something hard, too, to grasp about  becoming fully One with something infinitely better than anything we've experienced here on earth: the light that puts every candle to shame... the love that renders our most beloved on earth to count as nothing... 

We are but tarnished mirrors of God's ultimate love and glory.. but that's not as understandably personal, or graspable. Even having felt it, on occasion, in my own core, it can feel like a cold and distant comfort.

But part of me does also wonder if our frailty and physical limitations hold a sort of special beauty, too. Is there a unique beauty in the finite, like the fleeting patterns of sun distorted by rippled water, made visible only by the bending of the light?

Could this be an important part of God's plan it in a way we don’t yet understand? God loved and gave his son to have the world, even in spite of it, after all. 

 

“Why do you feel you have to choose?” 

Some time ago... around this time last year, in fact, I was troubled by what I perceived to be a fork in the road, where there were two paths I desired to take. And I recalled the question I had once been asked, "Why do you feel like you have to choose?" I didn't know, at the time, but I resolved to remain open to the idea of both paths together, to see where God might bring me. 

Over the course of this year, I thought I would have to put one of my desired paths on hold for the other, so I did... but I also slipped in my second path as much as I could among my other responsibilities, thinking I was being a little rebel the whole time.... But today I saw it -- that not only was the choice never mine, but there never needed to be a choice -- they were the same path all along. All this time I as becoming what I needed to become.

 

This is something I do so often -- thinking that things have to be one way, or the other, but as I learn more about the world, and God, and myself, I see that there are very few things in life that can be so categorized. People fight so often in theology about whether something is one way or another, when the answer is clearly both, and I can't blame them. Even when one finds the answer, the difficulty is in the balancing of truths we know to exist on both sides of various issues, and often this battle is not from one side or the other, but internal. There seem, then, to be four ways. One side, the other side, the inside, and what actually exists, outside. 

How often do we imprison ourselves at the crossroads for choices that were never ours to make? How often do we think we have to choose "stability" over living, or becoming? How much more freely could we walk, if we stopped trying to separate what was always one?

Life is far too short to live half-heartedly. 

 

The Avalanche I 

It started yesterday, I think. Or maybe the day before... Yes, the day before. This whole week has been a breaking down, a vulnerability, where I have felt things rushing past me, pummeling me from above and yet it was only because I was sitting still, and they were moving quickly. My job was to hang on, and I did. Now it is still. It is settling. The rush has gone somewhere else, and I am still in its wake.

But I had seen all of it a month before, in a dream that had apparently been preparing me for this moment. This was not labour imposed upon me, nor a burden to be borne-- but a gift waiting to be shaped.

 

Then, today, the rupture…Starting as a certain strangeness of mind I couldn’t define or contain. I was seized. Not by panic, nor by grief, but by something of such scale that my body didn’t know what to do.

I took to writing what I could, nearly delirious-- reaching, falling, seeking the fount that became more apparent in retrospect and proximity. Ah, and it was so… bright. Not in the physical sense that hurts the eyes, but the sense that pierced the darkness of the soul, burning it away like some sort of chimney soot. And yet, there was a weight, too. What was it? I was accompanied, beside, and in it. And I had to suppress my desire to know why, as if the question itself might limit the experience… There was no why. It needed no why-- it was the answer to itself.  

And I wept. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t want to. It was so beautiful, deep, vast. I knew that I would never be able to communicate it to anyone and have anyone understand except those who might have glimpsed the same. My body shook, I sat cross-legged with my head in my hands as the tears continued to fall and my soul felt pulled from my body toward the gravity of something in my midst, passing over me. When I looked up, it had been an hour. 

“It is vast... it is light." I wrote, "It is.. more than Truth it is somehow... It is unnameable. 

"It seizes me... I'm still crying, on and off. This is a lot. It is beautiful. I am not in distress, but I am not safe, either. I am vulnerable. Captive in it… I don't want it to leave. I don't want to let it go. I am afraid if I let go it won't come back. I want someone with me, but I have nothing to share. This is personal, and I will never be able to explain it. No one will understand this depth… There is no going back from this. There is only before and after. Everything feels irrelevant to this.”

Then I gave in, though the depth of my own vulnerability was upon me like an utter nakedness, lay on my back and let the swoon overtake me, wherein in my light-blindness I felt my heart lifted from my chest and broken... broken again, even as I thought I had managed to hold the pieces, even as I thought they had been secured together to some functionality. But no-- I had been so wrong. Again, the pain, the overwhelm, the awe of it; yet, I let it happen. Those pieces I thought had been left were absolutely no more than unidentifiable shreds of tender, irrelevant meat, somewhere beyond. And then nothing was left in its place. Was it healed? Was it absent?