Dear God,
Or Universe or Higher Power or whatever name you want to be called.
I’m writing because somehow I’ve lost you, though most days it feels like you lost me. Like the time my parents left me in the department store for almost an hour because they had four other screaming children in the car drowning out the silence of my absence. Thirty minutes for them to realize I was missing. Another thirty for them to drive back.
A whole hour; that is eternity for a kid.
And yet the last three years has felt like an eternity as an adult.
If my parents, who only had five, could lose me, then isn’t it possible that you, who have billions of crying children all screaming your name, for good or ill, and clamoring for your attention–isn’t it possible that you could have forgotten me too? Left me crying at the bottom of the down escalator because I have no idea how to climb stairs that are always moving against me. Stuck because I don’t know there are stairs that move upward? Or because I cannot find them and you are gone and the only ones left to hear my pleas are strangers who glance at me like “who has left this child unattended; won’t someone shut her up!”
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It is lonely at the bottom of the stairs.
But I am also grateful, God, for my chance to be here. Grateful because I have found others also crying at the bottom. Other children who are lost, hurt, and scared like I am. Strangers may look at us funny, some may leave my table because I cover pain with laughter and fear with inappropriate jokes, but those of us who understand being lost have found a place with each other. A whole collective of your children leaning on one another for support until you realize we’re missing and come back to find us.
Though, perhaps, you already have. Perhaps the hands that lift and help and heal are your hands. Perhaps loving each other is the real presence of God. I suppose, in that case, even those of us who can’t seem to find the up escalator are not missing after all. I think there’s hope in that.
So this week, God, please help me to reach out in love and to trust whatever hands reach out in return.
Because maybe… just maybe… one of them might be yours.
Trying so hard to find beauty in the chaos,
Little D
What brings you hope when you’re stuck at the bottom of the stairs?
