“God speaks to us as God makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.”
I come back to these words often.
I first heard the fuller poem by Rainer Maria Rilke several years ago in a talk a colleague and friend gave at a retreat. I wrote it down, and I came back to it again and again.
Each time I did something new stuck out to me.
But these words… these first two lines remained the most powerful for me every time I read them.
I mean consider just this line for a moment: “God speaks to EACH of us as he MADE us.”
Can you feel the beauty of these words?
I think I am struck by their beauty (and their TRUTH) even more in the last few years as I continue to be awakened to just how uniquely created and formed each of us is.
Each of us is so wonderfully and uniquely made and because of that, we have different ways of communicating our love for others. And in turn, we have different ways of needing others’ love communicated to us.
There is no ONE way God tries to get our attention. There is no ONE way God tries to shower love upon us. In fact, God knows us so intimately that God right now is speaking to us in exactly the way we need God to… so why are we trying so hard to listen the way someone else does?
God knows every fiber of our being. And so God speaks to us as God makes us and invites us to show up to the conversation exactly as we are. We can show up messy, broken, uncertain, joyful, chatty, emotional, stoic, smart, creative, sad, determined, argumentative, grumpy….
Whatever we are in this moment, God just invites us to show up so God can then take our hand and “walk with us silently out of the night.”
So will you show up as you are to God today and offer your hand?
