Tending.

Resurrection ended survival.

For so long, survival asked only what was necessary to make it through the day alive.

My hands prepared beautiful tables while captivity kept my own spirit outside the feast.

I learned to nourish others while enduring a famine of my own.

The Spirit of Real Jesus did not ask me to prepare another table.

He led me through the gate.

He seated me at His table.

He fed what captivity had starved.

He tended what captivity had exhausted.

As I have been nourished, something beautiful has begun to happen.

The gifts He first placed within me are waking again.

The way He knit me together is no longer being spent only on survival.

Art journals.

Bread rising.

Plants growing.

Paint on my fingertips.

A table prepared with joy instead of extraction.

Grandbabies savored long enough for delight to remain.

I am discovering that tending is not simply something I do.

It is what grows as the Spirit of Real Jesus tends me.

Not merely surviving.

Not merely recovering.

But learning, day by day, to cultivate the life He entrusted to me from the very beginning.