I have kept thinking about what happened in the sunroom.

Not because I think the sunlight needs explaining.

It doesn’t.

I am glad I experienced it before I understood anything about it.

I was sitting with my art journaling Bible open in front of me. I am not studying Scripture again yet. Right now, this is the size of Scripture I can receive: one small thought beside an illustration I can color.

One thought.

A little color.

No chapters. No sustained study.

Understanding is not what was lost.

Neither was my ability to articulate what I know.

Scripture itself had once brought Life. Then the words I loved became entangled with spiritual abuse, exile, and erasure.

I still know how to read them.

What has not fully returned is my capacity to meet them without what happened rushing into the room.

But something sacred has already happened.

Real Jesus has been faithful, over years, to divide what was done in His Name from His Name.

That separation did not come quickly.

There was so much that had become fused—His Name with human authority, His presence with terror, His character with what was done while claiming to represent Him.

And patiently, faithfully, He has made Himself distinguishable again.

I know Him.

I can speak to Him in the center again.

I hear the voice of my Shepherd.

I can recognize the difference between Real Jesus and what human beings built around His Name.

That is already a miracle.

The Word may take more time.

Not because I no longer love Scripture.

Not because I cannot understand it.

But because something once received as Life became a place where profound harm was carried into me, and my capacity to encounter it freely is still being restored.

So I will not force the bridge.

For now:

one thought.

color beneath my fingers.

Jesus with me.

A bridge back.

I also tried to write a prayer.

I pulled out the journal I had handpicked for that very purpose well over a year ago—the white one with gold flowers embossed across its cover.

I had chosen it because I wanted a place for words between Jesus and me.

The journal had been waiting longer than the words had been available.

I wanted them to come.

But wanting capacity does not create capacity.

That capacity has not returned in the same way either. I can speak to Jesus quietly inside my mind again—which is its own miracle of resurrection.

Internal conversation can flow again.

But translating that living conversation onto paper still feels difficult. I know what is moving between Jesus and me, and yet when I try to bring it through my hand into written language, sometimes there simply aren’t words.

That afternoon, I managed to write:

Let His face shine upon you.

Then I looked up.

Across the sunroom sat a little figure from The Sanctuary’s old Watering Roots days.

Her eyes were closed.

Sunlight was pouring over her face.

And I almost missed it.

If I had kept my head bent over the page, trying harder to find the words that would satisfy my idea of a prayer, the sunlight would have moved before I ever saw it.

Instead, I stopped.

I looked.

I delighted.

I thanked Jesus.

And I stayed there until the moment passed.

I didn’t understand it first.

I experienced it first.

And I think that order matters.

Before I Had the Words

I was formed for many years inside Titus 2 mentoring and evangelical complementarian spaces where language carried enormous spiritual weight.

Scripture came in passages, sections, chapters.

Understanding was articulated.

Prayer was spoken or written.

Growth could become externally visible through what someone could read, absorb, remember, explain, apply, and eventually internalize.

Language became evidence.

I had been trained for life inside this world. I still hold my biblical counseling certificate and certification as a professional mental health coach. What changed was not my desire to help people who have survived spiritual trauma.

The calling did not disappear. The desire to help did not disappear.

But the credentials themselves had become part of the traumatic terrain. I still hold them. I simply could no longer inhabit the professional and spiritual world they had once opened to me without my body remembering the system they came from.

There were beautiful things I genuinely loved within Scripture and theological study, and I still desire the return of that capacity.

I want to read deeply again.

I want sustained study to become accessible again.

I want written prayer to flow from my hand without having to fight for every sentence.

I hope those capacities return.

But I am beginning to understand that their return cannot become the measurement of whether my faith is alive.

Because my relationship with Real Jesus is older than all of them.

Secure attachment came before language.

Before I could explain Him, I knew Him.

Before I possessed theological vocabulary for relationship, there was relationship.

Before anyone taught me what faith was supposed to look like from the outside, God my Father had already met the little living essence who could not yet explain what it meant to be held.

When human arms did not reach for her, He did.

She knew Him relationally before she ever learned to know Him through exposition.

Nearness.

Presence.

Being held.

Being known.

Communion before explanation.

That original relationship survived beneath things I could not yet understand.

And then came everything that followed.

The living woman grew.

Her pattern-mapping intelligence became extraordinarily capable.

It learned language and pattern and architecture. It learned how to follow what had happened across years, systems, and relationships—holding details across time until the larger structure became visible.

For survival, it learned to do this quickly.

Eventually, that intelligence helped me build The Sanctuary, giving precise language to experiences that had once existed without adequate language at all.

That work mattered.

It still matters.

But I am discovering something now that I could not have discovered simply by mapping more precisely:

My pattern-mapping intelligence could give language to what the living essence had lived without turning the living essence herself into language.

She remained.

When Meaning Doesn’t Have to Come First

This is part of what resurrection seems to be changing.

My pattern-mapping intelligence is not my enemy.

I don’t want to exile the intelligence that helped me survive and bear faithful witness. Pattern belongs to me. Meaning-making belongs to me. Theology belongs to me. Language belongs to me.

The writer belongs here too.

What is changing is not their belonging.

It is their sequence.

For so long, understanding had to arrive quickly because understanding was necessary for survival.

It does not always have to go first anymore.

There can be an interval.

Something happens.

And before I understand it, I am allowed to live it.

The living essence experiences.

The living woman stays present.

Meaning can come later.

The writer can witness later still.

That morning in the sunroom, I could have remained bent over the journal, trying to manufacture the language I thought communion required.

Instead, Jesus turned my gaze.

And while I was trying to tend my relationship with Him through words, He tended the relationship for me.

He gave me sunlight.

My part was presence.

To notice.

To receive.

To stay.

To give thanks.

That was not a lesser form of communion.

Watering Roots

There was a time when that same little figure accompanied me through The Sanctuary’s Watering Roots.

Water flowed gently over her while Scripture was allowed to breathe life in small increments.

There are people who will know what those words hold.

Others may not.

That is all right.

Some histories are allowed to remain beneath the soil.

What matters here is that she was there then.

And she was there again now.

Except this time there was no water.

There was sunlight.

And something else had changed.

The internal conversation with Jesus was flowing again.

My hand could not yet follow my heart fully into written prayer.

My mind could not yet sustain the kind of Scripture study I hope one day to enjoy again.

But the relationship was alive.

It had never been waiting at the other end of my restored capacity.

Real Jesus was already there.

The Gardener Knows What I Can Receive

Perhaps this is why I don’t want to rush what is happening now.

Right now, sometimes one small thought from Scripture is what I can hold.

So I color beside it.

I let it remain small.

I don’t require myself to turn it into study.

And if that capacity expands someday, I will receive that too.

But reading a chapter will not make Jesus more present than He was in the sunroom.

Writing a page-long prayer will not make the relationship more legitimate than the inward conversation already flowing between us.

Capacity can return without becoming proof.

The Gardener knows what the living plant can receive.

And I am beginning to recognize that He is tending something much older than my productivity.

He is tending the living essence.

The one who knew Him before language.

The one whose original relationship with Him existed before so much became fused with terror.

The one who waited beneath years of survival and Sanctuary-building.

Real Jesus returned her to the center.

And perhaps part of my resurrection now is learning not to immediately speak over her again—even with my own beautiful, capable, meaning-making mind.

When she notices sunlight, let her look.

When delight comes, let her delight.

When Jesus is near, let communion remain communion before asking what it means.

The meaning can come afterward.

Sunlight First

I think this is the order I am learning:

Experience.

Receive.

Give thanks.

Then, perhaps, language.

Language is not being banished.

It is being returned to its proper place.

It can come afterward and faithfully witness what has already been lived.

Which is exactly what I am doing now.

The sunlight has already moved.

The little figure is no longer sitting inside that particular shaft of light.

The moment belongs to this morning.

Only now am I sitting here with enough language to tell you what I began to understand from it.

And I love that.

Because the writing did not create the communion.

The theology did not make the moment sacred.

The meaning-making did not authorize the delight.

Jesus was there.

I was there.

And before my mind could turn the moment into anything else, the living essence was allowed to receive it.

I did not need language to make Him present.

I needed presence to notice that He was already tending me.

And for once, the writer arrived afterward.

The sunlight came first.

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From Tending: Let His Light Shine →