Jenny Sullivan

Dear Beloved,

You are trying to live from a place of confidence and trust, but habits long-formed continue to get in your way. Some of these are ingrained in your way of being and your way of thinking that you do not even notice when they take hold of you. Yet despite their subtlety, despite the “naturalness” of such practices, their impact runs deep. It shapes the manner in which you think about and see yourself.

One of these habits is your tendency to see yourself through other people’s eyes. When you think about your past, your current situation, or a particular choice you have made, you often think of what others would say. Sometimes this manifests itself in visualization. You see the face of someone you know and you hear their voice responding, speaking some brutally honest judgement of your decisions. But other times, this projection of other people’s thoughts is not so explicit. Instead of actively imagining a situation, you think like the other person. In a strange sense, you seek to enter into their mind, to break into the stream of their thoughts and then to be pulled along by the current.

There is no life so tattered or spirit so broken that God cannot use it for His good. You are still trying to hold onto your life and as you grip the edges with white slipping fingers, you find it still eludes your control. You blame yourself, you shame yourself, you look to the future and past, and ever before you as you close your eyes is the unfathomable void, the as-of-yet unarticulated disaster towards which you see your life heading. In this moment, you have a choice. You can continue to live hunched over, crippled under the weight of what you were never meant to bear. Or you can let go, acknowledge your own fallibility, and cling to another surer sense of security. 

Dear Beloved,

You are much stronger than you know. You know things that you have forgotten that you know. You have gone places where you have forgotten you can go. You are not as alone as you think you are. There are so many things about the real that your mind has gotten twisted, so many ways that your fears have taken hold of you and unseated your intuitions. 

You can trust yourself a little more. You can blame yourself less. Those places you were in the past – there was a reason for your being there and there was a reason for your being there then. But you are not there now. You are here. And there are gifts in this moment of which you are worthy. There is strength for this moment, which you can claim. You deserve to be happy.