Notes About The Poem
Unearned Stillness shifts from the stress of trying to be perfect to the peace of knowing you are accepted. It portrays God's love as a constant presence that walks with you through the messiness of life, rather than a demand for perfection.
Unearned Stillness
The dawn arrives. Not with a fanfare, but with the dry, singular click of the kitchen faucet leaking onto the tile.
The light is a thin, bruised violet— the kind that exposes the dust motes hovering over the ceramic ring where my mug sat all night.
I’m taking a shaky, deep breath. The silence here is heavy; it has weight. It is an anchor. I am bracing for the day, my jaw locked tight enough to ache.
I’ve lived in these seasons before— stumbling through the wreckage of half-hearted prayers, convinced I am just a sum of my own failures. But in the raw edges of my history— the way my hands still tremble when I replay that mistake— I feel this pressure.
Not a booming voice. Just a tether. Persistent. Tightening when my own grip on the world goes slack.
This love doesn’t ask me to be polished. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop— expecting the cold, sharp word that I’ve finally done something beyond the pale of being loved.
But it doesn't leave. It feels like the first, heavy rain that breaks a heatwave— soaking into the dry, parched earth until the ground turns to mud.
And there— the light catches the white chip on the rim of my mug. A tiny, intentional wound. It feels like a message: I am still here.
It looks at the things I bury— the petty, sharp-toothed thoughts, the way my stomach knots at 3 a.m.— and it doesn't look away. It doesn't judge. It just holds the pieces.
This is home. I’ve spent a lifetime trading accomplishments for a currency that never bought peace. But the door is off its hinges. It has been for a long time.
My jaw unclinches. To be fully known— every scattered, frantic, messy gear in my mind— and to realize it changes nothing. I am still held.
It doesn’t ask for perfection. It asks for the truth: the contradictions, the fear, the shaking hands. It is the hand that reaches into the dark, not to pull me into the light, but to walk through the gloom with me, turning every bitter, intense moment into a lesson on what it means to hope.
This is the bedrock. Beneath the noise, a rhythm. I am not an accident. I am not a surplus of human effort. I am deliberate. Wider than the sky. Persistent. Immovable. Waiting for me every time I turn around, reminding me: You are never, ever alone.
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