Still.

I think God grew tired of churches long before we did

Tired of men translating eternity
through microphones

Tired of watching humanity kneel
before buildings
while ignoring the trembling holiness
inside one another

My mother searched for Him everywhere

In Pentecostal heat

In Catholic incense

In prophecy

In oil pressed against foreheads

In men who claimed certainty
with frightening ease

She carried God from denomination to denomination
like a woman carrying a dying bird between her hands
afraid that if she loosened her grip even slightly
faith itself would escape

And I

I was baptized five times before adulthood

Five separate offerings to the water

Five attempts at becoming clean enough
for heaven to stop looking through me

Water over my hair

Water over my eyes

Water entering my mouth
while strangers said
be born again

But even then
I remember surfacing each time
feeling exactly the same

Only colder

Surely—I thought
God must grow weary of our desperation

Surely even He must ache
watching us wander endlessly
through sanctuaries
while He waits patiently for us
inside ordinary suffering

Because He was never only there

He was in my mother’s hands
smelling of detergent

In the quiet after arguments

In women removing their earrings at midnight
too tired to continue pretending strength

He was there
the night I cried so hard
my body shook against itself
and no miracle arrived except morning

Except breath

Except survival

I think that was God too

Not rescue

Not spectacle

Just the unbearable mercy
of remaining alive

And sometimes at night
when the world finally stops speaking
I close my eyes
and feel this immense heat
hovering softly against my eyelids

Not fire

Not punishment

A tenderness so luminous
it frightens me

I never open my eyes when it happens

I cannot

The warmth feels too familiar

Like being held
by a presence that witnessed every fracture of my life

and still

did not abandon me

Not when grief hollowed me into silence

Not when fear turned my body
into a house of locked doors

Not when I mistook survival for failure

Not when I lay awake at impossible hours
begging my own mind to spare me

It saw me then too

The woman crying quietly in parked cars
so no one inside the house would hear

Every version

Every unraveling

Every private devastation
carried so quietly
the world mistook my endurance for strength

Seen

Entirely seen

And somehow

Still loved

Not repaired

Not rescued

Loved

That is the part that undoes me

Not heaven

Not scripture

Not the promise of eternity

Only this unbearable possibility

That something vast and merciful
stood beside me through every sorrow I survived
without once turning away

And joy that pure

Cannot belong to coincidence

No

That is faith

Palpable faith

Faith with a pulse

Faith that enters the body quietly
until loneliness itself begins glowing from within

Now when I think of God
I do not imagine judgment

I imagine exhaustion

Divine exhaustion

The sorrow of loving humanity endlessly
while watching us search everywhere for Him
except the places He keeps appearing

The hospital room

The empty kitchen

The trembling body

The grieving mother

The lonely woman standing barefoot at dawn
trying one more time
to survive her own life

And still

Still

He comes

Without thunder

Only light

Only breath

Only the strange and merciful feeling
that something invisible
has loved us all along