God builds in ruins. There's a kind of betrayal so
subtle it looks like love. But it is not love.
It's stepping into the place of Christ, making myself the
sacrifice so someone else wouldn't have to break.
I thought if I absorbed the blows, softened the weapons,
swallowed the shrapnel, maybe then I would be safe.
Maybe then I would be loved if I didn't realize the breaking was
never mine to prevent. It was theirs.
And sometimes breaking is it's mercy.
I stood there bleeding and I called it loyalty.
I cut pieces off myself to keep the peace.
I called it faith, but it was just self betrayal.
It is the slow erasure of voice, of hope, of need in the name of
survival. And what kind of relationship
demands that? Only one already haunted by the
ghosts of ungrieved sorrow, the poltergeists of war, the Spooks
of silent rooms and shattered trust, it whispers.
Maybe if I'm small enough, soft enough, silent enough, I will be
loved enough to stay alive. But safety isn't silent.
Safety is the kind of love that leaves room to speak, even when
I'm wrong. Even when I'm messy, even when
my words come out cracked and bleeding.
Safety is mercy, not fear. There's another kind of
betrayal, too. It looks like power.
It roars like strength, and it's just the erasure of someone
else, the refusal to hear, the refusal to bend, the refusal to
carry any weight but your own. It thunders.
I must demand enough, control enough, and crush enough.
Then I will be strong enough to stay safe.
But that's not power, not the kind Christ showed.
Real power walks on water and rescues the drowning.
Real power raises the dead. Real power lays itself down and
picks up life again. Both betrayals are rooted in
fear. Both are hollow.
Both leave a void where love, just it, can't live.
And I see it now how often I traded pieces of myself to keep
the fragile, the fragile peace. How often I called it loyalty
when it was really loss. How often I gaslit myself into
believing that all suffering was holy, even when it just, it just
wasn't. I spent years trying to hold the
ruins together, cutting myself open to patch the cracks.
When blood wasn't enough, I used tears, and when tears weren't
enough, I used skin. And when skin wasn't enough to
hold it together, I offered up my bones.
And that was that was where I broke.
And for what? A house built on grief.
A temple for ghosts. But even as everything
collapses, God builds. Not after the wreckage.
In the wreckage he builds with hands I can't even see.
I feel it. He builds on ground I forgot
even existed, hope blooming through frozen earth, a future
breathing in the ashes of a past I tried so hard to keep from
burning. Maybe it's only when we break,
like really break, that we're finally porous enough to let him
build without getting in his way.
I think about how easy it is to see the boundaries of my body,
like your arm is not my arm and my skin is not your skin, but
somehow in the unseen places, the heart, the soul, the ties we
call love, the lines, they just blur.
Where do I end and you begin? When love becomes a trauma bond,
we lose the ability to even tell.
And so I'm learning. Like the slow crack of ice in
winter, like the stubborn green of early spring.
I'm learning to see the signs, the red flags, but also the
green shoots, the truth rising in the thaw.
I'm learning that ambiguity is not the enemy, it's the soil
where discernment grows. And I'm learning that Christ is
not a narrow perch beneath my feet.
He is a wide and steady pasture, even when I can't see it, even
when it feels like I'm balancing on the head of a needle.
I don't have to make him bigger. I just have to let him show me
the land that was already mine. And I'm learning not to erase
myself for someone else's comfort, and not to erase
someone else for my survival. I'm learning to abide where he
builds, even as the old walls fall, even as the ground shakes,
even as the ruins smoke. I'm learning that in the middle
of the breaking there is already a new beginning.
Yeah.