Manifesto: You were made for something more

Hand holding, elbows brushing, hips swaying, feet stomping.

The world has come alive, awakening from it's winter, and I am awakening with it.

I can feel the revival stirring inside of my body, feel the rhythm as my heart beats in time, resounding against my ribcage

I want to be free

I don't know anyone but no one feels like a stranger

There is music, and laughter, and dancing, and the world feels like it has been lit on fire, and I want to be on fire too

I want to glow, emit the light that has been cooped up inside of me for so long

I want to shine like the sun as it peeks through the clouds, warming my shoulders, reminding me of miracles

The hot lemonade is warm on my tongue, but comfortably so. It tastes like honey, like promise and sweetness and hope. It is warmth and comfort.

We watch as people move like they were born solely to exist in this moment, like nothing else matters besides this awakening, and I can feel my heart awakening too

I am coming out of a long, cold winter

My bones are still rusty and don't quite remember how to dance but the echo of my heartbeat (sounds like a symphony) is a persistent partner, always inviting me to dance no matter how many times I step on his feet

She says my confidence is coming back, he says the light is returning to my eyes, and I feel it all as I am shedding extra layers

I want to experience what it means to be alive

I play a game of feeling everything, letting it be absorbed into my skin like it is medicine, letting it wash over me like the promise of hope

It makes me giddy

Reminding me what it's like to have a voice, to break free from the shackles of darkness, to grow my own set of wings

It reminds me of being seven, when I still fiercely held on to my light, when the whole world made me insanely happy

Ten years have passed, and I have become more jaded, hardened by the world, and yet I still feel that same awakening inside of me

the same hope and potential and possibility

this could be the start of something beautiful

And I want to fall in love with this moment, and these people, and myself and the birds and the trees and the hills and the sky and everything that seems to call my name, begging me, for this one moment, to be alive

I am poetess, story teller, belonging to the universe and the One who created it all, created to marvel and wonder and be fully alive in every moment while my heart is still beating like a drum inside of me

I was made to feel something more than the weight of the darkness as it wraps itself around my shoulders and calls itself warmth

I remember a few years ago sitting at a kitchen table in a house that didn't belong to me, writing on the back of a grocery list that I want to be enough for myself

I didn't know then that those words would become my cry as I wandered through these next few years of my life

I was, and am, searching for ways to be enough for myself

I am realizing now I don't have to do anything

I just have to exist

in wonder

in grace

in love

there is nothing I can do or not to do make myself enough, I just need to accept that I am

I was

And I always will be

I'm still learning what that means

I'm coming back to that place where I live in honesty, not belonging to another human being but myself, marveling at the world

Sometimes it's easy to write from this place

It's not so easy when you are lacking connection, when the pieces don't quite fit, when you spill your coffee and spend the afternoon in bed and stub your toe on your way out the door

I am learning this too is it's own kind of beautiful

If this is crazy than I want to be that. I want to fall in love with every moment of my one wild and beautiful life, I want to see heaven and God and the divine nature of it all in everything, I want to finally learn what it means to embrace my enough-ness and be free

I want to use these wings to fly

Filling the hole ~ Part 2

I'm not sure how to write this post either. But I want to.
I'm filling the hole with music - this hole inside of me caused by word-less-ness- and I'm filling the hole with dancing.
I don't understand a lot of things right now. All these hopeful and heartbreaking things stirring around inside of my heart like tiny birds waking from their sleep and breaking their egg and seeing a whole new world. It's like that, and it's different, and it's confusing, and in this time of pain and discovery God is teaching me.
You remember in the Bible, when David danced before The Lord and his wife got embarrassed and David said, "I'll become even more undignified than this?" I think that's a similar kind of dancing; that raw, unhinged, primal desire just to move. To physically respond to the moment 1
It's like that. In this place where I am, when everything is new and different and confusing and I don't understand and I can't find the words to write and I'm exhausted and hopeful and full of all these conflicting emotions, it is in that place that God is doing something new and wonderful. I like the verse in Hosea 2: 14, where it says "Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her."
It's like that. In this wilderness I'm in, He had lead me here. He has lead me to this place where I am stripped of everything, of my health, of my ability to turn words into beautiful things, of my strength, of everything I thought was stable, of people in my life. He has brought me to this wilderness where I have nothing but Him, and it is here that He speaks tenderly to me.
And that kind of beauty, in God getting down on my level and speaking tenderly to me and giving me glimpses of hope and of Himself, that requires a response.

1. Taken from Natalie Lloyd