There are times merely living can be overwhelming...from the height of joy to the depth of grief, the sheer reality of being human comes with an immense amount of emotions.I’ve been breathless multiple times by the simple sightings of beauty, the way a song is sung with such passion and the wonder of life as it emerges.Then there's the pain of little ones taken far to early, the loss of someone we love and the sufferings so many must bear.Life is full of a variety of feelings...And yet no emotion compares to the ones we experience standing on the edge of a mountain ridge or those while we are surrounded in the darkness of a valley.These heights and dips have a way of marking our journeys in permanent ways.Because it’s in these spaces our souls are introduced to a sacred beauty which exists deep within others too. Here we meet people we feel like we’ve known for years as we split our hearts wide open for one another to see...When we stepped into this journey 5 months ago, neither of us knew how it was going to change us.Because when you are deep in the thick of it all, so much which is spoken of this disease is about surviving..Recently, I burst into tears, because for the first time in months, my body felt changed in ways I had no control over.I knew we were traveling to the other side, at least for now, but I felt ill-prepared and overwhelmed by the grace greeting me on the other side.Because it takes a renewed mind to emerge from the shrapnel that’s been wreaking havoc on your world.And the hard truth was, I didn’t want to tell anyone about this.I didn’t know how to tell my closest friends who’d been holding my hand through these days because surprisingly enough I didn’t have the words to sum it all up.I mean how do you even tell someone your heart is aching from all the trauma it’s been walking through?How do you describe the heaviness within?I honestly didn’t want to give it all words.Because people want you better and they want to hear of all the good you’re experiencing.They want your old self back and really just want things back to the way it was before...maybe it’s because in some strange way, their life can return to normal again too.So, how do you tell them you’re different?And that you may never be the person you were before?How do you tell someone all the things you’ve been told by drs and all of the hard things you’re still walking through?People want see the miracle of bringing you back to who you were before.But what we can often misunderstand is:every struggle resurrects someone new, changed from the inside out.And this new being is exactly who God created them to be...Because the thing about valleys, like no other place, is they require healing.And healing is never a simple process.It takes time for our emotional being to regulate again,It takes endurance for our body to return to health.It takes strength for us to resume to our daily tasks and rest to be able to recover from the trauma we've been going through.It takes us sitting alone in discomfort awhile before it completely resumes to its natural rhythms and the honest truth this all is hard work.So, as we step into what’s next may we re-discover God's grace like never before.Because it’s in moments like this we must resist the urge to rush through theholy act of re-shaping our soul.But this simply takes time...and in the middle of these moments it can be discouraging.|Because we can’t really see what’s happening deep inside of our souls.And the thought of remaining stuck here in-between is rather frightening....we’re tired of continually adjusting and feeling out of whack..This is when we need reminded that God created us with the beauty of resilience, to rise from the ashes and heal our brokenness.Because it can be really uncomfortable to sit through healing.We’d rather reason it away or numb our wounds, because healing hurts.Lately, I’ve been asking God to make us whole and to take away our wounds.And then I realized,I can’t control how quickly I heal.It will come when the wounds are ready to heal.The strange thing is; the pain hasn’t dulled, walking through this hasn’t changed the worries we're carrying to God or diminished the struggle.Instead they've actually become markings of remembrance; reminders of what’s happened at the site of one of these wounds.And one day they’ll turn into scars.Because I've had it happen before.And as I look across our days thus far I'm reminded of the trust in God these wounds  required for us to survive..Friend, if you’re out there surviving your own version of hard today, give your wounds the time they’re needing to heal.For it’s in the healing of wounds God marks us with scars which speak bravely of all it’s taken for each one of us to survive....And from these beautiful markings...our reckless stories of faith get told.