I can’t sleep.
It’s 3:23 in the morning.
I’m not sure if what I’m going to write next makes much sense. I hope so. But in the event that it doesn’t, I apologize.
Lately, I’ve felt softer. Deeper. Connected.
But it’s not new. No, this softness is an old familiar friend. A once constant companion that made me the impressionable young woman I am.
Or, rather, used to be.
I don’t think I’m soft anymore.
I think, over the past year, a lot of things happened. Not bad things, but…worldly things. Things that hardened the fragility of my small self. Maybe it was the city. Maybe it was college. Maybe it’s just what they call perspective.
But it can’t just be that, because I never noticed my own impressionability. I was just me. But now that it’s gone, I can see how I have changed. I’m different.
There’s a verse about this in Proverbs that I love:
Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
Whenever I read this verse, I think of hands. Big hands, cupping my precious, soft, tiny heart inside the protective cove of bent fingers. And I think of how those hands are God’s, and He’s holding my heart for me. He’s keeping me, protecting me. He’s trying to save me.
But everyday, I choose to take my heart into my own hands. He lets me have it, because He knows I’ll have my way, but at the close of each day, I always come back to Him. And I place my heart, now a little bruised, right back into His hands, because I know it’s safer there. It’s guarded.
The bruises take a long time to mend. And sometimes, the softness can’t return. But God never refuses my heart. He always takes it back, and holds it in His hands, and loves it. Loves me.
Amazing.
