God builds in ruins. There's a kind of betrayal so subtle it looks like love. But it is not love. It's stepping into the place of Christ, making myself the sacrifice so someone else wouldn't have to break. I thought if I absorbed the blows, softened the weapons, swallowed the shrapnel, maybe then I would be safe. Maybe then I would be loved if I didn't realize the breaking was never mine to prevent. It was theirs. And sometimes breaking is it's mercy.
I stood there bleeding and I called it loyalty. I cut pieces off myself to keep the peace. I called it faith, but it was just self betrayal. It is the slow erasure of voice, of hope, of need in the name of survival. And what kind of relationship demands that? Only one already haunted by the ghosts of ungrieved sorrow, the poltergeists of war, the Spooks of silent rooms and shattered trust, it whispers. Maybe if I'm small enough, soft enough, silent enough, I will be
loved enough to stay alive. But safety isn't silent. Safety is the kind of love that leaves room to speak, even when I'm wrong. Even when I'm messy, even when my words come out cracked and bleeding. Safety is mercy, not fear. There's another kind of betrayal, too. It looks like power. It roars like strength, and it's just the erasure of someone else, the refusal to hear, the refusal to bend, the refusal to carry any weight but your own. It thunders.
I must demand enough, control enough, and crush enough. Then I will be strong enough to stay safe. But that's not power, not the kind Christ showed. Real power walks on water and rescues the drowning. Real power raises the dead. Real power lays itself down and picks up life again. Both betrayals are rooted in fear. Both are hollow. Both leave a void where love, just it, can't live. And I see it now how often I traded pieces of myself to keep
the fragile, the fragile peace. How often I called it loyalty when it was really loss. How often I gaslit myself into believing that all suffering was holy, even when it just, it just wasn't. I spent years trying to hold the ruins together, cutting myself open to patch the cracks. When blood wasn't enough, I used tears, and when tears weren't enough, I used skin. And when skin wasn't enough to hold it together, I offered up my bones. And that was that was where I broke.
And for what? A house built on grief. A temple for ghosts. But even as everything collapses, God builds. Not after the wreckage. In the wreckage he builds with hands I can't even see. I feel it. He builds on ground I forgot even existed, hope blooming through frozen earth, a future breathing in the ashes of a past I tried so hard to keep from burning. Maybe it's only when we break, like really break, that we're finally porous enough to let him build without getting in his way.
I think about how easy it is to see the boundaries of my body, like your arm is not my arm and my skin is not your skin, but somehow in the unseen places, the heart, the soul, the ties we call love, the lines, they just blur. Where do I end and you begin? When love becomes a trauma bond, we lose the ability to even tell. And so I'm learning. Like the slow crack of ice in winter, like the stubborn green of early spring.
I'm learning to see the signs, the red flags, but also the green shoots, the truth rising in the thaw. I'm learning that ambiguity is not the enemy, it's the soil where discernment grows. And I'm learning that Christ is not a narrow perch beneath my feet. He is a wide and steady pasture, even when I can't see it, even when it feels like I'm balancing on the head of a needle. I don't have to make him bigger. I just have to let him show me
the land that was already mine. And I'm learning not to erase myself for someone else's comfort, and not to erase someone else for my survival. I'm learning to abide where he builds, even as the old walls fall, even as the ground shakes, even as the ruins smoke. I'm learning that in the middle of the breaking there is already a new beginning. Yeah.