Beautiful

Remember your beauty.
Remember your worth.
Remember that you mean something.
That the world is a brighter place with you in it.

If you feel that you are broken, know that I am broken too. If we were all honest with ourselves and with each other, we'd realize that we are all broken in some way. All the pretty masks we wear won't hide it. Perhaps it's time we stop hiding it.

I know the weight you carry is lonely and painful and devastating at times, and the darkness feels as if it might swallow you whole if you just stopped for a second to let yourself truly feel. But there is beauty in your fight. There's a fierceness in your will to survive. There is brilliant, blinding light on the other side of midnight, just waiting to break through, waiting to save you.

So if you are so buried in the pain that you can't see a safe way through it, if you feel like you're not good enough, not worthy enough, not strong enough -- let these words ring out like an anthem in your soul:

You are beautiful.
You are beautiful.
You are beautiful.

You are too beautiful to lose. 

Perspective

As I looked at a sunset panorama I captured tonight with my phone, I began to analyze how some of the lines were crooked --- how I didn’t hold the phone steady enough, how imperfect it was. But I’m reminded now that often times the world is full of beauty – astounding beauty; and yet, we can’t see it because our perspective is skewed. We focus on what is flawed, what we’re doing wrong, what we could be doing better. But in that tendency to overanalyze, to think purely with a critic’s mind, we miss it.

Life. Beauty. Stillness. Love.

Perfection is pointless. Love cannot exist without first knowing pain. Beauty and peace and hope cannot thrive without us first feeling broken and lost and despondent. So I’d rather capture something in all its imperfections – in all its raw authenticity. Because that is the definition of beauty – in nature, in life, and in ourselves. Nothing else compares. Nothing else is worth our time.

Owning Our Stories

These struggles do not define you. You are not your illness. Not your weakness. Not your brokenness. Not your scars. And though these things all shape you, they do not define you. You are much more than that. 

Believe in your story. Fight for your story. It's worth it. Even on the darkest days when you feel like no one is left standing next to you, it is worth it. Someone out there needs you to speak when they cannot. Someone out there needs to read your words. Someone out there needs you to stand beside them and say, I'll fight for you and with you. I cannot promise that in owning our story we won't ever know darkness again. But I can promise that you are not alone. I am not alone. We are not alone. 

All of us - the brave, the broken, the hopeful, the hopeless - all of us are part of something much bigger than we know or see. Our community is in each other, and our currency is love.

Letters to God

I am standing out here in the storm, screaming. I’m screaming at you, God. I’m screaming for you. What do I need to do to get your attention? If you want me to believe, then be here. Show up. People are starving – for sincere community, for meaning in tragedy, for shelter in chaos, for love amidst hate. What am I supposed to do about this mess of a world we live in? The brokenness and suffering is immeasurable. If you are, then be. Here. With us. Be here, not in corporate songs we sing, but in the trenches of our darkest nightmares. Be here, until your warmth seeps into our veins and frees our hearts from all the pain and all the doubt and all the insecurities and all the unworthiness.

Despite all my best efforts to ignore you, to rebel, to push you away, to scream profanities when no other words seem to express my despair adequately enough, and to annihilate your very existence in my mind – despite all this, I cannot help but see you in the seemingly minute details of the world around me:

In the sun when it rises on the horizon;
In the wind as it sweeps through the trees and cools my face;
In the beauty of foreign landscapes;
In the last bit of light before nightfall;
In the still of evening when an owl swoops overhead and perches on the branches above, looking down at me with wide, almost understanding eyes.

In those brief moments, I want to believe that you're present; and that somehow, everything will be okay.

The Idealist

You blame yourself. You blame your big, bold idealist heart. You grew up with grand dreams and lofty expectations, but you didn’t plan on the difficult moments. As a child, you couldn’t foresee the heartbreaks, the disappointments, the emptiness. You couldn’t identify your predisposition to feel things so intensely or understand your sensitive, artistic nature. You couldn’t recognize the beauty in it just as much as you couldn’t anticipate the challenges.

You learned to roll with the punches. You bounced back from every move. You pushed aside the things that hurt you. But with each roll and bounce and push, your once wild, open, childlike heart with its big dreams and bigger hopes grew a little bit darker, sullied by invalidation and loss of things you could never put a name to. With that harsh reality came acceptance that everything you'd hoped for might be out of reach for someone like you.

And yet, through all the things that could have broken you, that did break you, that might still break you, the idealist fights to hold on. And every now and then, when your guard is down, the idealist whispers -- inspiring you, and reminding you that happiness is possible, dreams are reachable, and love is against all odds entirely attainable.