I talk a lot about God here. I talk about God because I am a drowning woman holding onto the only hand that has ever reached down and pulled me up. I talk about God because God sent me angels in a home where I was beaten, in a home where I was traumatized, in a home where I was only worth my silence and my servitude.

My first angel wore a blue polka dot dress and a smile that filled me with God light. I was too small to walk so I would crawl up that long flight of hardwood stairs and knock on the upstairs apartment door. One knock and she was there, her elderly face glowing with light, her 50’s era clothes and hair rocking along with her bright red lipstick. I called her Grandma, and she called me hers, raining down such love like I’d never known in human form. And when my mama called and I turned my head to listen, the door would close and Grandma would slip away. I was seven when I understood no one lived in the upstairs apartment when I was small.

I held onto Grandma’s sunshine, her strength, her understanding, her ability to pour love into me. Her residual love kept me going, its purity, its brightness filling my heart when nothing else did. She was my first angel but not my last. God sent me more angels though I didn’t know them as anything but good humans in later years.

God is to the drowning what freedom is to the prisoner, what healing is to the broken, what home is to the destitute. God has no religion but billions of children each precious and loved and held though few are awake enough to feel the support that is all around them. I have needed God all my life. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t ask God to take me home, to set me free, to hold me close so I can remember what it is to rest again in absolute love. But I must wait, am told to be strong, am told that I have a purpose, that I chose this life. So, I listen and work and pray that each day will be a day I can bare.

When I was six, I asked my mother what suicide was. She told me. I asked her, “why doesn’t everyone do it?” I wasn’t born broken but I was born remembering happiness, unconditional love, joy beyond words, and the weightless bliss of belonging. None of those feelings have happened here so I must wait out this life and live it with disciplined purpose and grace for now.

I talk a lot about God because to exclude the one who made all things would be to break the covenant that keeps me in my body. I am here because I and God agreed that there was work to be done. I am still here because I and God love the earth. I am still here because, in some way, I know that my presence on this earth is important. And so is yours my brother, my sister. We live in an incredible time of change where so much is possible.

So, I ask you not for the last time to dig deep, love unconditionally, pray for guidance, listen in your stillness to the whispers of your heart, and come to know the I AM presence that loves you so much it will never let you fail. You are held. You are loved. You have purpose even if you don’t see it. You are love poured into form.

I love you. God loves you. All is as it should be no matter how much it hurts. For some insane reason we’ve got this.