She said God’s words back to me as she leaned in, to interpret what she had heard.
Know your people.
A simple phrase I had heard and studied and ran by people. I thought it meant something like, “know well the ones that you are to love well.” Turns out, that is one part of the story packed into that phrase.
The past few weeks have been full, of life and struggle—the kind you are willing to bleed for but not die for. You know when life is good and steady, when you are about to reach a clearing— eyes wide hoping to see for miles at the top of just… this… next… lump of frustration? You get there, just about always, but the view is cloudy, the shore is foreign and cold—you’ve landed on Greenland you might say. The bitter cold calluses your throat and you forget to swallow and breathe the air. The mar of the wind—this bitter resolve—does not quite enter your soul and you walk on. You walk on because there is little worth dying for and your learning that death is a process full of half-lives and glimpses of tomorrow.
I’m moving forward it seems, knowing my people—naming those I know I need. The systems of knowledge, of safe ideals, just don’t work in the open and broad place I am hooked into.
Know your people.
Because if you don’t you’ll bleed out—and die alone and without love that’s been there all along. I think to be-loved is an unending exercise in reentering yourself without turning in on yourself, it feels dangerous—as chaos boils up. But the reentering process is a thing that people, your people, must venture to traverse with you. They need to be invited and trusted, but, they must go with us as we enter the deepest wounds that we have been given. Their words are God’s words to us, words of compassion (with-ness) and they are the naming of the clouds—these realities that are to be engaged, loved and found to be the way to life.
