And yet: deep and personal acquaintance with a poverty of emotional resources can nevertheless be a powerful teacher, and the equipping coming out the other side, an embarrassment of riches, if we choose to humble our preconditioned responses and accept a path of discovery. We find we begin to fit within our own skin with a greater readiness at such times, not trying to become something we were never intended, but simply, the awareness comes to the fore that who we were uniquely apportioned to be is actually who we’ve always wanted to be.
The striving to meet the expectations of others, often with a perceived spectre of disapproval glowering on our missteps and even best but at times failed attempts can be enough to get us off the path. We wander around in bitter terrain perhaps looking to someone or something to define us rather than risk exposing our limitations in the trial and error that is a requisite to any worthy undertaking. In the process, we don’t so much lose our way as lose ourselves.
And yet, even in the starkest moments of self-rejection quietly disguised as complicit behavior on behalf of others, a great conundrum runs alongside: we must lose ourselves to find ourselves.
Perhaps this is the doorway to hope written of by the prophet Hosea in words penned in response to a woman whose life had splintered in untold ways, deemed without remedy if not by those around her, perhaps to her own estimation of herself. The farther our wanderings from the core of whom we are made to be, the more prone to believing untruths of who we are, layered over our true essence. The voice of the Creator breaks the silence brought on by the wreckage of missed opportunity, deplorable choices and resulting denial. The voice is one of adoration, of seeing through our false layers to the glistening reality that lies underneath. It is the voice of worth, and it is the very sound of healing.
Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor* a door of hope. *(Hebrew word meaning: muddy, turbid, gloomy, dejected)
We do not know this woman’s backstory and what led to lifestyle of destructive choices, but even if the storyline is not quite the same, perhaps we can hear the remedy to our own misadventures, whether past or present, echo through. It is the very language of hope, and renewal—based not on human critique, but on the wisdom that ‘mercy triumphs over judgment.’