Returning Grace

What do you do when it all keeps coming back to you? 

When you feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, sense it all... 

When the things you'd most like to forget suddenly spring upon you like an unwelcome guest and you wonder how to re-discover your peace... how to find your soul's rest once again when everything's been disturbed. When, years after the fact, you still find yourself reliving storms you'd rather put behind you. 

Flashbacks. 

Maybe it's the "pop-pop" of small arms fire or the smell of smoldering ashes after your home burned down. Maybe it's the whir and beep of hospital machines or the color of somebody's clothes. Maybe it's a song on the radio or the taste of a certain food. Maybe it's the existence of a particular place as you drive by or the tone of a person's voice or words they've said. 

Whatever the cause, you find yourself taken back into the dark places. Into the hidden spaces where nobody except you ever went. Into the thoughts that aim to hold you hostage to all the emotions you felt or things you pondered.... 

Chest tightens. Head begins to throb. Heart races. Palms sweat. Breathing gasps. You're no longer in the present but transported into the past by some cruel internal time travel that put you right back into a moment you've maybe been trying to escape for a long time. 

One would think that time would heal as they say. But the mind remembers. And perhaps healing doesn't work that way. 

What do you do? Where do you run? And where can you hide when you might not be able to hide and all your want to do is hide? 

Hide from the pain. Hide from the past. Hide from the embarrassment of what these moments do to you. Hide from yourself even. 

What you do when you've lost hope of what to do and the oppressive feelings just won't leave and you're overwhelmed by the weight of a time long gone that still has a hold on you... what you do is you run... 

Not away from but into. 

You run toward the arms of the One who's never left you in these moments ever. Who saw everything that you saw (and more!) and loved you still. Who went through the worst pain anyone endured so that you could have a reason and a way to endure yours. You run toward the heart of the God who's heart beats passionately for you and who is always making a way forward from any heartache and who is forever in the business of renewing you. 

You return to the Grace that never fails to keep on returning to you. 

Mind panics and you grasp for faith and it all feels like a thousand torturing somethings running all over you and inside you and around you but still... you look up. And you look for Him. Because He is the Love that's always there. The Love that gives you strength. The Love that gives you life. The Love that grants you hope. 

Storm waves wash over your soul in rapid succession and you're taken back to a moment when some other fearful humans sat in a boat and felt their drowning was near, too. Cried out despairingly that, if God cared, He would save them... even as He slept in the back of the boat. Forgot that the God-Man was right with them all along. Forget that they were still kept and held even as the threat of their sinking was all about them. And all it took was a simple command of peace. An order to be still. 

And that same One who said those very words then is the same one that is still calming storms today. The same One who can and will calm even this storm. Right here. Right now. Right always.