Extravagant Love // Receive, Rest, & RejoiceSample

When You Need to Return

My daughter, you return with what you have. You lay yourself down, all of you, emptied. Because here, girl, in that posture, I make you clean. 

You return to be cleansed, to be renewed. A return makes the choice to come back to a place where you were before. But to return to Me—you are not going back to the same place because I have made you new. I have turned you around. I have touched your face with my hand, my other hand on your heart. 

And girl, you are not who you were before.

So returning is beginning, not going back. Returning is breathing fresh air into stale, unused lungs. Returning is marking the place where I was and claiming the new heart I’ve given you. Returning is bending; it is kneeling; it is spreading yourself out, waiting to receive. In returning, your new eyes I give you show you the past with hope in the pain, light in the darkness, the little-girl-made-woman I have always loved and come to redeem again.

Stay here now, daughter, my adored one. I carry you now. I lift your head now. I let you bow low to be lifted high with new life. Believe returning is a re-turning—a reorienting, a readjusting, a revisualizing, a renewing. It is the revising of a story I’ve always seen, with a beginning and an end all the same. 

New.

Return with Me, darling. Return to Me now.