BREAKTHROUGH

Behind my eyelids the faces come, one after the other like flowers in a field…until the canvas goes dark…and nothing remains but tiny images of my own elusive veins and my prayers for breakthrough.

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It’s been six weeks and I am late to my blood draw by fourteen days.  You would never know by looking at me. Sometimes even I forget. But still, the apprehension of “knowing” invades the hidden parts of me in ordinary hours.

Surprisingly, despite my own health situation, the prayers that come in silence are rarely directed at myself. Instead, the inspiration comes when the faces of others unfold like scenes from a movie running through my head. My pray is fluid. Less script. More improv. I think you could say I enter in with an expectancy that the right words will come, even when I’m feeling uninspired. The truth is, you, your stories, always inspire me.  

In case you were wondering, this is how I pray for you—

not rotely or routinely

but as if the very moment—the breathing and connecting, the uttering of each word

is essential, critical, upending in its breakthrough power.

Breakthrough is not a word I use lightly. But it has been the word that it has followed me through my recent days. Today, the needle penetrating the vessels in my hands is colorful reminder that I need a breakthrough, not directed at lab results but the disposition of my disquieted mind.

I’m not sure I am ever really aware of this load I carry until I awake at 6am to make it to the clinic before all the other heartbreak storytellers arrive.

It seems the breakthrough we all crave has less to do with what we know, than with the secrets we are keeping from ourselves—

Like me, you know what they are.

You. Know. What. They Are.

The thing that keeps you locked in your position is not elusive, but evidenced in the way you live—

In the consistency of critical conversation,

In the agreement to “settle in” to what is,

In the living of mundane realities with little expectancy,

In the lack of power in beliefs, dreams, even words.

The things we have no control over are rarely the writers of our stagnancy but rather the authors are the continual, habitual agreements we make. The one most-dangerous of all agreements is not to listen to ourselves.

I am known to say that if you are still repeating the same complaints one year from now, you will have to seek sympathy from someone other than me. This seems so harsh to read. But I am preaching to my own self.

Do we have twelve months or even tomorrow to allow what we know is holding us back to continue to do so for even one more hour?

Deeply stuck. Is that how you feel?

Perhaps you have forsaken the right thing in this moment for fear of what could happen in the next.

Overthinking the outcome divorces us from our Creator’s omniscient power, taking away his ability to write a future you couldn’t ever imagine for yourself.

In the “praying for yourself department…” do you find it difficult, maybe impossible sometimes? I have learned that when it comes to asking for prayer, it is best not to be shy.

This past week I shared with a dear friend that I have recently felt an unmistakable and seeming mysterious shifting in my life. I elaborated that when I stopped to analyze where it came from, God clearly interjected, “Someone has been praying for you.” Without hesitation, she replied, “That someone was me!”

What a gift that moment was for two women surrounded by the overwhelm of hectic lives, enveloped in the knowledge that we serve a God who transforms every future detail.  

When we pray into another’s situation, the forcefield of stagnancy is pierced. And through the hole created, a life-renewing energy moves in. This energy begins to devour the unhealthiness; first there is this subtle, curious difference, then an otherworldly lightheartedness is felt.

Otherworldly lightheartedness. This is the form “breakthrough” manifests with me. Replacing the overwhelming worry is this involuntarily glee. I can only describe this response as the feeling when one child plays with another—

Freeing, trusting, eager, present, completely unafraid.   

I believe this is the essence of the Holy Spirit, how this otherworldly entity transcends the troubles of this world.

I am reminded that I am not some mystifying prophet of what will come.

I am the co-author of my here and now.

One right move. Then the other. This is the best predictor of the life-story God will ultimately write.

 When you seek breakthrough do what you know to do.

Then ask those who love you to pray God will honor your commitment.

Believe that where inertia once resided,

The space for breakthrough is made.

NOTES:

It still surprises me, this emotion that takes over each time the day of my lab draw arrives.

This week was a little unusual. For some reason my “standing orders” were misplaced.

To the technicians who know me, the problem was an “easily solvable” task…

But not without a heavy dose of personal patient advocacy that required a measure of problem solving and decorum that pushed me to my physical and emotional edge.

Though I would not have believed that I was capable of adding one more stressor to my already tightly-packed bag, there I was orchestrating the ordering of eight complex tests without losing my “self” in the process.

Breakthrough of every kind happens when we make ourselves available for the unexpected, when we not only adapt to the complexities of life but integrate them into the framework of who we are,

So that we can strategically evaluate every situation from all sides,

So that what happens to us doesn’t bend us into something or someone we are not,

So that our expectation is recognized not as the only option but one of many beautiful outcomes,

So that there is revelation that every situation involves and revolves around others who are integrated into a story that is not solely ours,

So that our “agenda” is understood as finite, even diminutive, in context of a grander/Divine purpose.