Day Six
Falling…
How do I look this child in the face and tell her everything is going to be okay, when the reality all around her says it’s not? When her nine year old frame spins on a planet full of poverty and pain and she knows more than most what this means. When she lives in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world and bullets don’t stop and ask if you’re too young. When she lives in a community where girls lose childhood innocence far too soon, and she’s knows in her numb heart just how this feels.
I don’t need to tell her about all this spinning sadness, because the scars on her heart have driven it into her soul. She knows. With all the hardness of heart of a veteran of war, she knows. She knows the darkness of violation that no nine year olds should know. She knows that humans flex their ‘free will’ at the expense of hers. She knows. She knows, she feels, she lives, all of this. She knows the dark, and it isn’t light. It weighs heavy on her soul. Just as it does for all of us, spinning on this planet.
Where is the light in all this spinning pitch? Because there are seasons here on this patch of earth when we all worn-out wait, languishing in darkness, searching, straining, scanning the horizon for a thin gold rim of hope.
This is not the world that any of us were dreamt for. This is not the world our fragile human hearts were formed for. It is now our lived reality, but it was not our breath’s beginning. The beginning that was planned for us in a garden long ago.
There was another reality then. Unmixed with fear and pain and thickening dark. A time when light and hope danced all together, when this whole spinning planet spun on chords of love alone. When we were wholly alive in the breath of God in our lungs, living in trusting love, purposeful existence and volitional freedom.
‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’
Genesis 2:31
It was all very good. All of it. Good and safe and free from all this spinning pain.
