This is not much to you, but to me, to me it is much.

I'm not sure how to start this. I suppose, in a million ways, I've started it a million times over. Small leaves, bitter smatterings, hopeful batterings, and still voices, the beginnings of essays that never were are scattered throughout my draft folder. I'm trying, I told myself for weeks and then I just stopped trying altogether.

And now I am here. Not trying any longer. Not at all.

Someone asks me today if I feel like my faith is getting stronger. No, I answer. Not at all. My faith is smaller today than it's ever been before. But somehow, left with this small trickle of faith, I am beginning to see a bigger God.

I thought that when I finally returned to this page it would be with hurrahs and long, magnificent testimonies of what God did in me. But the truth is that the truth is just the uncovering of one rock after another, building a footpath to somewhere. I don't know where. And, for the first time in my life, I'm really unconcerned about that. Like I said, I've stopped trying.

Correct me if you must, challenge me if you will, but somewhere in the past five months of dark, dark doubts and hard, hard questions, somewhere at the end of my rope, at the end of my spiritual strength, somewhere, maybe in the middle of new death and old death, new doubts and old certainties, somewhere in all that I have begun to see that it is not my efforts that change God's mind. In fact, my efforts have very little to do with God's mind at all.

I have not seen yet, but I have begun to see.

I am not awake yet, but I am awakening

For you and you alone
Awake my soul, Awake my soul and sing,
For the world you love,
Your will be done, Your will be done in me.

Along this footpath these stones are helping me:

Preaching the Gospel to the Dechurched
The Reason for God
Dug Down Deep
This song
This song
and This song
This passage