I’ve been pretty silent for a while. It started off as a result of being too busy (the excuse) and feeling a bit removed from God. I wasn’t hearing from him but in hindsight, that’s probably because I wasn’t going to him as intentionally as I should’ve been. Quite apparent from my recent blogs, I had been feeling burnt out, uncomfortable to say the last, extremely frustrated (as my last attempt to put it into words). I wanted to run away from it all. There was nothing resolved in my heart, no answers to why I was feeling the way I did, and the only solution I had was to suck it up and keep going because life doesn’t stop just because it’s hard. Of course, this is not a solution at all. God in his grace, has intervened and brought me to a place of rest. It’s not a physical place, the best way I can describe it is a spiritual place. I feel like the accumulation of emotions and thoughts I was having reached a sort of limit and toppled over the edge into this space where God is simply holding me. I literally feel as if everything has been put on hold and he is giving me the space to simply rest in his presence. From the outside, and the inside too frankly, it feels I’m degressing in my spirituality – my formal prayer times are shorter, I am not writing lengthy reflections, and I don’t have the eloquence or knowledge to answer difficult questions that come my way. The silence that began as frustration has become a restful silence. A one of just being, not even thinking that deeply, but just being here. Not just with God, in God. I’ve intentionally been taking this time and space to just listen. Listen anew. I didn’t want to say or share anything remotely like a regurgitation of what I already know, or what I’m supposed to say, the “right answer” so-to-speak. A thing I told myself, and God, as I started this blog, was I was only going to share something from the Holy Spirit, if and whenever that is. 

Until this point, it’s just been silence. I still wasn’t particularly hearing from God. And I was still trying to accept what I had been feeling all these months. My prayer is simple: that I might meet Christ anew. I want to be in love again, date Jesus again. I don’t want our relationship to get tired and mundane, like a lifeless marriage. But to do that takes work, it’s not an endless waiting. And through quite an unexpected passage, God spoke to me. Luke 6. Jesus is on the verge of being accused of violating the Sabbath because of his intention to heal the man with the shrivelled hand. The focus of the passage is the wisdom with which Jesus deals with the religious leaders. But his compassion on the man is notable. Somehow, I saw myself in that man. His shrivelled hand wasn’t obvious, and that’s because he was hiding it. In a sense, he hid because he was shrivelled but he was also shrivelled because he kept himself in hiding. It wasn’t just his hand that was shrivelled, it was his heart. He felt unworthy, ashamed, to extend his hand and his heart towards anyone, but mainly to God. So he shrank back. Jesus made him stand in front of his hand and stretch out his hand. To obey, he would need courage to expose his must vulnerable area. More than that, he would need faith that Jesus could in fact heal him. I want to appear that everything is okay with me. In a sense, I’m open – I joke around, talk freely, make sure my company is having a good time with me. But there’s a part of me that shrinks back – whenever I feel uncomfortable, whenever I feel ashamed, incapable, a failure. My reaction is never to persevere through; it’s always to retreat, to cover up, to pretend it’s not even there. I felt that way when I failed the bar exam. I promised myself that I would never touch anything law-related again. I felt like that whenever I got my Portuguese wrong, whenever I felt like I looked stupid speaking it. I just wanted never to hear it or have to speak it again. I felt like that after I got my first bible student here and she stopped answering my texts. I never wanted to evangelize again. And I felt like that when I felt neglected by a good friend here in Brazil. My coping method was just to accept that we weren’t as good friends as I thought, as I hoped. “Just accept it”, I’d tell myself, and swallow how sad I felt about it. In all these things, I felt so incapable, so small, humiliated. I wanted to hide away forever. But as Jesus told that man, “Stretch out your hand”, he tells me too, Paulina, stretch out your hand. Only then, can I heal you. The discomfort of stretching out my ugly, shrivelled self is humbling. But first and foremost, I stretch it out to God. “Here I am God. This is me. I am not strong and put together. I am weak and ashamed. I hate to challenge things. I want to run. But I stretch my hand to you and ask, have mercy on me, Lord and give me strength to go through what I can’t on my own.” I’ve made a decision to stretch out my hand and practice Portuguese for an hour a day. I’ve decided to stretch out my hand and go out to campus and talk to students again. And today, I decided to call up my friend and tell her how I feel and asked her to tell me how she feels, if I have wronged her in any way. Finally, I am stretching out my hand in writing this blog. My main intention is to say, glory to Jesus because he heals our shrivelled and tired selves. In the cross he has taken away our shame and given us the strength and hope to challenge again. Jesus died and he rose again. He now lives in us as the King over all. He is able to make all things new. Amen.