Above the Waterline

They say to trust the Lord and He will help get you through your struggles. But I think that’s something the superficial Christians say to keep them from truly experiencing the underside of God, the side where your heart is a razor cutting into the tender hope laid bare in the bones of your soul. When you are breaking every day, a constant thorn in your side that does not seem to be getting any better or going away any time soon. My heart bleeds for the impossible, and I cannot just turn off the way I feel. My head says trust the Lord because He works all things out for me, but my heart, that bruised, lonely piece of me where real life seeps in, it is not so sure, cannot see the other side because it takes every ounce of energy just to take another step.

Trust, to me, is tiny. It’s baby steps. It’s all I can do to place one shaky foot in front of the other. One breath from my lungs into another. It’s holding my eyes above the waterline, refusing to submerge under the sea. It’s deciding to see God’s goodness in the mundane, for only the moment stretched at my fingertips.

I have to keep telling myself to breathe. I have to literally remind my lips to part and exhale the air I’d been subconsciously trapping within, holding off my heart.

Today is today and tomorrow is tomorrow and that’s all I know. In the bowels of the bad and breaking, it has to be a moment by moment walk with my hand stitched to His. It is one tiny whisper of trust, and then another.