Response...

Your patience, my love, has astounded me as I struggle to enter into the abiding rest that God offers. Your words consistently breathe calm into lungs so prone to panic gasps. I feel summoned to an existence of deep and unwavering peace, but it seems to be a realm that hasn’t granted an easy admittance. Though the deepest utterance of my spirit reiterates that the will of God is to be trusted, I don’t easily settle into these periods of such vague and formless unrest. The swelling and ebbing flow of shadows causes my instincts to initiate a frenzied search for escape, rather than settling into a resolved and patient peace. But I sense His promise to wake within me, even in the reverberating hours of darkness. Though it doesn’t immediately discharge me from my environment, it helps my eyes readjust to their surroundings.
This is where liberation lies, not in the escape, but in the awakening.

I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Psalm 130:5-6

“And it is the deepest darkness that we most fully possess God on earth; because it is then that our minds are most truly liberated from the weak, created lights that are darkness in comparison to Him; it is then that we are filled with His infinite Light which seems pure darkness to our reason. In this greatest perfection of our faith the infinite God Himself becomes the Light of the darkened soul and possesses it entirely with His Truth. And at this inexplicable moment the deepest night becomes day and faith turns into understanding.”
– Merton