goodness is in this place, do we know it?

do we ever really know where we are?

It’s a curious thing. Almost every year, I’ll look back on pictures from the year before or years farther back, and I’ll think I was so pretty then and realized, glancing at my pixel flesh with a fresh set of eyes, like an outsider to my own frame, no one probably noticed how big I felt my arms were as I sat trying to adjust them to look slimmer, or noticed the stretch marks on their tenderest parts.

I’ve robbed myself of just letting a picture be a picture, because I was so concerned about making sure I was the most flattering version of myself. And seeing this pattern so often — taking pictures and realizing later I really was as beautiful as I should have felt, I think it’s only smart to stop the cycle.

I want to realize there is goodness now. In all aspects of my life. I want to know where I am. I wonder, if I’ve so often missed the beauty in my own appearance, how much more am I missing the presence of goodness, even God Himself, in the daily?

See, the thing is true, there really is goodness now, and we don’t always recognize that we’re in it. Feeling an echo of Jacob lying on the rock, proclaiming, "God is in this place—truly. And I didn't even know it!”

We walk into answered prayer requests that we sobbed and tarried for, but the moment we don’t recognize it as good anymore, we render it as not. We are always in the midst of good things; it’s just a matter of knowing where we are — and Who is with us.

With love,

Rebecca