"ease; expand"

I never knew life could feel this easy. So expansive.

Growing up I heard a lot about “running our race well.” then handed a list of all the ways i could stay within the lines in order to do so. In some ways I still love the heart and sentiment behind that. I’ll always wanna live a life worthy of the woman I’m here to be and the freedom that Jesus paid for me to know.

However the urgency culture and anxiety attached to our beautifully glorious lives being a “race”, thank goodness, I no longer have to subscribe to. It only fueled my own anxieties and pressure to be good. To walk my own tightrope of perfection. To be someone I believed I wasn’t “yet”.

I really took the message of running “well” to heart: be exceptional. perfect actually. impressive, definitely.

And when you’re used to holding it all together as a way to cope, well you can imagine what an exhausting run that message would become.

That’s when the Lord gently started unraveling me, slowing me down. Way, way down.

Showing me how slow and steady was actually the secret of getting anywhere worth going to.

Teaching me this expansive, mighty life I was after was found right here in this moment and not in the next one.

Teaching me his standards were a lot more forgiving than mine. A lot less weighty, a lot lighter, freer, and much more fun.

He began teaching me how easy he was to please,

showing me how much he was delighted in all of my being just as much as my becoming.

A dear woman i adore once said to me “em, the world is big and life is long” and you have all the time, to unwind and unravel and travel and come alive and SCRATCH THAT and start over. over and over and over.

We live in a culture fixated on getting more or further down the road. Robbing us of savoring the sweetness in our very hands. But time is kind, it’s never taking, it invites us to look up and all around and take deeper breaths and say thank you and kiss longer and love unreasonably and melt into the sweetness.

Been trading running for enjoying. Allowing. Undoing. Redoing. Rewriting. Painting. Dreaming. Playing. Messy. Glory.

to live — abundant and alive, right here and now. The most delicate and wonderful, mighty magical thing.