This passage, as evidenced by the circling and underlining and highlighting and starring that surrounds it, has spoken to me greatly over the past year as I’ve completely devoured this very intimate devotional. It speaks to me, again, today, as if I’ve never read it before. As a “seeker of walking in my own wisdom,” I long to walk in the way of victory he describes. My name, after all, means victorious. How can one possibly feel at peace in their own skin if they are living contrary to their very definition, imparted to them from before birth?

 

But so much darkness and confusion can begin to engulf me, obscuring my vision, making it hard to see my way clear through the inner maze of my heart. But he gives me a light in that darkness. He tells me what to do. Write. “Write and hold back nothing of all I shall say to you.”

For years I avoided writing again—it felt too vulnerable to even consider the thoughts in my head, much less put them to paper. To do so would mean to feel, and feeling was something I had generally been avoiding. Even as I returned to writing five years ago, I barely dipped my toes in the pool, afraid to dive in—afraid, as always, of the deep water. This was fine when it was just my husband and me—he was content, most of the time, to sit on the edge of the pool by me with an occasional splash thrown in to remind him he was still alive in the water. But not now. Now we have children, and they play right smack dab in the middle of the water, where I cannot reach them from the edge. And they are begging me, as is their father, to come on in, the water’s fine.

This is my attempt to get over my fear of the water. My attempt to shatter my fear of the deep. My attempt to reconnect with my heart, and with those who have been affected by having severed that connection years ago. This is my attempt, however imperfect and inconsistent and inane, to “Write those things I say to you,” hoping and praying that as I write my way through this darkness, He will be faithful to “make my way a path of light.”