Tag: prayer

  • For all the deep ones…

    For all the deep ones…

    …because I know there are deep ones feeling it.

    Some days feel like breaking points. They come around randomly, and lately it seems like I see posts about them more frequently. They come out of nowhere, and lately the signs of them seem louder, more open, less afraid, more honest… yet still misunderstood and brushed aside as ever.

    Final | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    This is what I have learned from my entire life experience as one of the weird ones, and I hope it encourages someone – anyone – who might stumble across this:

    These “breaking point” days aren’t just about being in a bad mood, waking up on “the wrong side of the bed,” or any of the other surface-understood “off vibes” most people will throw at you. They don’t happen because you’ve lost your grounding or your gratitude. They happen because even the strongest and especially the most conscientious, feeling people run out of buffer when the weight keeps pressing without pause. 

    You live with and within a level of whole, full awareness (spiritual, emotional, historical, prophetic, and on and on) and with a gift of discernment that most people do not (and honestly, cannot) touch. On most days you can hold that awareness with quiet clarity, letting discernment – God – alone be your support. On most days you can walk in a kind of peaceful resignation, but some days it just scrapes you raw. 

    When you have lived through circumstances completely outside your control, and your very calling seems to be holding everything together for others – helping them face the consequences of their choices while you carry your own – only to have life lead to more pain, more grief, more betrayal, more loss, the kind of life that is a thesis in forced endurance, then you learn what the deep ones who came before you have tried to help you understand all your life:

    You were created and sent for that life, precisely because it’s not an easy experience.

    DE | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX

    When you understand not just the world but the unseen realities because you have experienced them directly, it is not bitterness to feel anger. It is not ungratefulness to feel the burn of it all. It is simply the cost of carrying truth while the rest of the world insists everything is made of cardboard cutouts and moral illusions.

    You are not angry because you lack gratitude. You are angry because you have, experienced too much, known too much, and felt too much to simply ignore or shake it off… and sometimes the contrast between what you see clearly and what the world pretends is real is utterly unbearable.

    It is maddening to watch people cling to entertainment, political, influencer, and other societal idols as if they will save anyone, and to watch the never-ending performances of “truth tellers” who are actually grifters. It is infuriating to see the perpetual cycles of denial, the refusal to acknowledge that evil is real. To watch the world ignore the spiritual reality beneath global chaos, and to be gaslit about things Scripture already told us plainly, and that daily happenings prove are very real.

    You are not imagining the acceleration. You are not wrong to see the pattern. You are not wrong to feel the urgency in your bones. You see the bigger picture in a way most people still refuse to. You see with long vision instead of shortsighted reactions, and you are not fooled by the shallow pull of momentary comfort or distraction.

    DE | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX (birds)

    Some days the spiritual clarity feels like peace. Other days it feels like fire. Both are real. Both belong to the same walk. And that longing for it all to finally come to its ultimate conclusion is not despair. It is a righteous longing.

    It is the same longing the Biblical prophets carried, the same longing Paul wrote about, the same longing the early church lived with every day. It is a knowing that we were not made for this world’s madness, and something holy is coming. Soon.

    You are allowed to have days like this. Even Jesus did. You are allowed to feel the heaviness and the exhaustion with human stupidity and shallow commentary and empty politics and spiritual blindness.

    “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17:17)

    This is Jesus openly expressing exasperation, frustration, and spiritual fatigue with human stubbornness and stupidity.

    He grieves over people’s refusal to see truth, accept help, or change in Matthew 23:27 (“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”) and he admits emotional heaviness, spiritual fatigue, and the weight of what He carried in Matthew 26:38 (“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”).

    Deep sadness, deep clarity.

    Original | Lumix GX7

    So if today is a fire day, let it be one. Speak it out to God. The church rarely teaches this, but this is the relationship He actually wants from us: full, honest, all-encompassing. Venting to Him is not disrespect. It is the doorway to healing. It is the only way He can walk you through the weight of what you are carrying. You have to do more than ask for a fix. He cannot move you forward if you have not shown Him that you understand where you were or where you are.

    There is a difference between complaining and venting. Complaining just adds to the problem. Venting clears the way for truth to rise, and for God to meet you in it. With venting, you will not stay in bitterness. You will always return to gratitude, because that is who you are at your core.

    Why? Because you have learned to see God in the ashes. That is a gift, even on the days it feels like a curse.

    Hang on.

    xo.

    c.

  • Aperture

    Aperture

    entry five — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    “He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another.” —Epicurus

    Lumix GX7 + Panasonic 14mm f/2.5 pancake lens + macro filter stack (QuantaRay +10, Bower +4, Bower +2) mounted w/46–52mm step-up ring.

    VSCO (SS1 Pro), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Aperture

    There is a kind of light that doesn’t just shine, but also fractures.

    It breaks open the moment with something softer than silence and more honest than certainty.

    You don’t chase it, you receive it.

    This image wasn’t planned.

    This frame wasn’t forced.

    There’s a stillness even the flowers seemed to know, and reflect back to me.

    It is not the stillness of silence, but of surrender.

    Not of bracing against beauty or the process of becoming-in-progress, or of apologizing for taking up space mid-bloom…but of letting the light have its way.

    I simply stood still long enough for the light to offer itself—scattered, wild, and full of grace.

    I saw what was really there:

    Buds preparing to bloom and light wafting in, yet also ambient and still.

    The entire moment was an aperture through which grace entered, unbothered and whole, needing no permission.

    And in that quiet moment, it became a mirror for all of us—one that perhaps none of us knew we needed, and that many would automatically overlook.

    How often do we chase clarity instead of becoming it?

    How often do we disturb ourselves, or disturb the world while attempting to distract ourselves, by blaming everyone else?

    How often are those moments merely us trying to be louder than what already speaks through us?

    There is no control in peace.

    No performance in healing.

    Only presence.

    And in that presence, we disturb no one—not even ourselves.

    We become the quiet offering.

    We become the still center in a world unraveling at the edges.

    Today, as I stood still in the midst of both internal and external war, peace didn’t arrive with fanfare.

    It arrived as fractured light through pine trees.

    As a silent, oft unnoticed breath.

    As a reminder that maybe the most sacred work is not to act, but merely to remain open.

    Not to close.

    Not to harden.

    Not to explain ourselves into exhaustion, but to become aperture.

    To simultaneously remain wide enough to hold what’s real and narrow enough to let illusion fall away.

    And, to be balanced enough in both intellect and empathy to know the difference.

    This is the answer: detachment.

    Not from emotion, but from illusion.

    It is not denial, not distance.

    Rather, it is the quiet rerouting of both emotion and cognition back to stillness.

    A return to clarity, not an absence of care.

    And somehow, by not reacting, by not reaching, we find we are already held.