Jenny Sullivan

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. 

Dear Beloved,

It is hard for you to look at yourself and see something that is beautiful. This is because you see only the separate component parts and never the whole. You isolate a particular physical feature and analyze it as though it can be stacked up against others of this kind. But as soon as you remove this feature from the living, breathing whole, it becomes lifeless and flat. On its own, this one “part” of you is nothing, and yet when seen in the fullness of its context, the whole self radiates through, and the brilliance and uniqueness of this self overshadow so-called objective “imperfections.” 

Dear Beloved,

If others perceive you wrongly, this does not alter the truth of who you are in any form. You are still too concerned with what other people think of you. A sense of ‘justice’ burns within your spirit as you listen to words you do not think are true, words that seem to belie the integrity or complexity of your character. But these words (and false impressions) are only meaningful insofar as you allow them to affect you. There is nothing wrong with advocating for truth, but there is a time when it is worthy to so act and a time when this staunch defense of truth derives more from your own insecurities or fears than  from anything else.