Today the echoes are loud.

Old CPTSD symptoms have risen with roots I am only now beginning to understand—patterns that formed across a lifetime, long before I had language for what was happening inside me.

I am frustrated.

I would rather be farther along than this.

I would rather embodiment mean waking up and simply inhabiting my life without having to notice what an old nervous system still remembers.

But that is not where I am today.

And I do not want to turn resurrection into a glossy story where the evidence of Jesus is that nothing difficult ever rises again—

or where the past that made bodily resurrection necessary is somehow wiped from all cellular memory.

The cells can be made new.

The living essence can be returned to center.

The spirit can be restored to communion.

And all three can still remember the ash from which they grow.

Some days, the ash tastes almost sweet because the blooms are what I notice first.

Other days, the ash tastes bitter because it was bitter.

A body can no longer be covered by it.

The living essence can no longer be buried beneath it.

But residue can still rise.

And sometimes remembrance arrives as a symptom before I have chosen to remember anything at all.

That does not mean the fire has returned.

It means the body remembers what it survived.

Echoes do not negate resurrection.

They testify to the fire I rose from—

a fire that no longer consumes me,

but can still hurt.

Echoes do not negate resurrection.

They simply testify to the fire I rose from—

a fire that no longer consumes me,

but can still hurt.

There was a time I would have surrendered to the starvation narrative.

The symptoms would rise, and feeding myself could disappear with me.

But I am home with Jesus now.

And He feeds me.

Sometimes through communion that has no words.

Sometimes through sunlight.

Sometimes through the ordinary wisdom of staying in my body long enough to make lunch.

And sometimes, quite literally, through salad.

So today I filled a jar.

Greens.
Chickpeas.
Corn.
Something nourishing gathered into glass while my body carried more than I wanted it to carry.

This is not proof that I am healed.

It is not a Christian lifestyle moment dressed up as resurrection.

It is quieter than that.

I am frustrated that the echoes are here.

And I am eating anyway.

Jesus does not require me to hurry past what my body is bringing to the surface.

He does not shame me for wishing I were somewhere farther down the road.

He stays with the living woman while old roots rise.

And resurrection gives me another knowing now:

He will tend these too.

He does not leave old roots hidden simply because the fire is over.

If they are rising now, I can trust that they are rising into the Light because they are ready for His gentle care.

Not because resurrection failed.

Not because I have been returned to the ash.

But because what once had to remain buried for survival no longer has to live in darkness.

Jesus does not expose a root in order to shame the body that carried it.

He brings it into the Light so He can tend what is finally ready to be tended.

And when the time is right,

prune what no longer belongs in the Garden.

And I can stay too.

I can feel my hand around the jar.

I can feed the body that carried me through what it had no language to explain.

I can be disappointed that this still hurts

and grateful that it no longer consumes me.

Both are true.

The old narrative said starvation.

Jesus feeds me.

And today, His tending looked a little like a jar of salad sitting on my kitchen counter that I chose to eat.