Evolving

Growth is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, terrifying process. It inevitably involves discomfort and vulnerability and mess ups. It's slow and pain-staking and tends to shake up your world, causing tension and disruption. Growth is the sprout fighting against all odds to reach the surface, pushing through soil and clay and gravel to get there. It is the buds daring to open, to catch the sun, to accept whoever may pass by. Yet it is also the shovel that slowly digs up the dead roots to make room for new life.

I find myself in a season of growth, a season of searching through the great forest that makes up my life thus far. In it stand an abundance of trees, some majestic and sprawling, some new and delicate, some barely staying upright. As I wander through I find that some must be uprooted entirely. While others simply need branches trimmed or removed. It is not easy work. It requires attention and time and intentionality. It requires input from those that know trees and roots and me. It requires a good bit of support from my community. But all these and more have come together to create space and safety and love and motivation enough to allow me to engage this subconscious jungle.

If I'm honest I would like someone else to do the job for me. I would like to come back to this place, months from now, years even, and simply be able to enjoy how the greens play in the light, and the critters scamper from branch to branch, and life exists in abundance all around. I would like to avoid the bruises and the backaches and the discouragement at just how slow going it all is. I would like even to section off pieces as condemned, to avoid them all together-- there is so much hurt and pain tied in with the good... isn't it easier to throw it all out?

But it is in the back-breaking, grueling, lay-it-all-out-there work that real change happens. It is where beauty has a chance to set in again. It is where love and grace and truth meet.

So ever so slowly, I begin. The next thing I see is where I start today. I ask for help when I need it (which is often). I bounce idea after idea off the pages of my journal and the people I trust most. I think constantly and deeply. I get lost in the depths of each root system and the memories they bring to the surface. I get frustrated. I cry. I give up. I try again. I hold on to hope that as each individual tree becomes healthier, I too will grow. I will learn how to respond and how to engage. I will learn how to press in and keep going when it hurts. I will know when to push my limits and when to rest.

It is arduous work, and it will never be finished (growth should be life-long). Yet it is a labor of love-- for myself and my world-- and thus it is a labor that is worth every drop of sweat, and disruption.

As long as there is growth, hope remains a gentle candle flame; flickering perhaps, but never extinguished. May it always be so.