I remember forming a quiet belief that if I wanted to be a success, I needed to be thin. I’d look at the winners and the way their ribcages protruded out through their leotards, and I’d look down at the way the skin bulged out the side of my bent knee or at my stomach rolling over itself. I didn’t like that my body did what it did, and I didn’t think my body could be that of a winner. I was eight.

I think God wants beautiful things for us, like a rich community and a purpose and a legacy and some damn good memories. But if we’re ever going to experience all of that, we have to go through stuff with people, mend relationships when they’re hurting, show up when we’re tired, stay on some sinking ships, and put down the match before the wind blows and all of sudden we’ve burnt some very lovely bridge.

I looked back among those signs that said yes and the signs where he said no, and I noticed I had been ignoring some signs of my own… I had rewritten history in my head to make us make sense - but there is a difference between wanting him to choose me, and just wanting to be chosen.

If I questioned the trajectory of my faith, was I abandoning it? Was there a way to redesign my priorities and purposes without landing in the lukewarm waters below? I was terrified that if I slowed down my sprinting, my faith would grow cold. I had been charging hard after a life of missions and outreach, while my heart had been yearning for family and art. How could it be that God had planted the dream in my soul for this ministry, and yet could be calling me away from it so soon to be a wife, a mother? Was it the whisper of God, or was it burnout, chasing me toward another life?

I burritoed my boy in a blue towel after splashing in the shallows. My last mouthful of wine: sandy, still sweet, rich. After the colours sank lower, lower, now beneath the horizon, we pointed at stars, and I couldn’t find the Southern Cross anymore. I settled for the Big Dipper, saddened that I had forgotten how to find my glowing arrow that for twenty five years had pointed me home. 

In 2019, I wrote a written piece called The Table. it was my way of processing what God had been teaching me through the previous couple of years, and it became somewhat of an altar that I would revisit to reposition my heart. these words helped me keep soft toward God, open to his help, remembering the gospel that not only saves me in eternity, but brings me to close to the Saviour himself, today.