The People Around Me

Thank God for community.

Thank God for turning my face to the people around me, always.

Thank God for working among them.

Thank God for touching my life through others.

Thank God for "coincidences" that bind me with to people around me.

Thank God for His patience and love and goodness.

Thank God that He wants to give that to me, so undeserved. 

The people around me are all dealing with variations of the same.

We're all on this Earth, here, with no intention of staying.

We're all living in what Anne Lamott calls the "tragic human condition."

We want to be close to God but we are called to be here and do His work and we get lost.

I'm okay with that, I'm okay with working and not feeling good... in my brain.

In my brain I know what I am fighting for, or really, who is fighting in me.

But my heart is so weak sometimes, it falls and fails and gets left in the dust.

Thank God for being there too,

when the world knocks us down and clouds the space around us.

He's in the dust around my friends' pain and my friends' confusion and my friends' doubt and my friends' complete failures.

He is absolutely in mine.