You Have Named an Acute Season

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." Psalm 46:1

Something has knocked the ground out from under you, and you came here anyway. That tells me two things about you: you are wiser than the instinct to disappear, and you are more tired than anyone around you knows. I read every intake myself, and I will be personally in touch with you soon. Not a system. Me. 

Where You Are

The War Zone is the season of impact: the loss, the betrayal, the diagnosis, the church conflict, the marriage revelation, the crisis in your family or your body that divided your life into before and after. In this season the ground itself feels unreliable. Sleep is strange, appetite is strange, time is strange; you can be fine in a meeting at two in the afternoon and unable to breathe in your car at two in the morning. Waves arrive without warning and without apology. And because you are a woman in ministry, you may be doing the most exhausting thing a human being can do: leading others through Sunday while your own Tuesday is on fire, comforting people with a steadiness you cannot currently find for yourself. Hear this clearly: what you are experiencing is not a failure of faith. It is what a soul does when the ground gives way. You do not need to be impressive right now. You need to be held, and being held is the entire purpose of this room.

With Yourself, With the Lord, With Others

With yourself, the acute season demands one radical mercy: lowered expectations. You are not behind on anything. Feeding yourself, breathing, and telling one true sentence to one safe person is a full day's faithfulness in a war zone. With the Lord, you may find that words have run out, and that is permitted; the Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words, and the Psalms were written in large part by people whose ground had also given way, so borrow their words when yours are gone. God is not requiring composure from you. He is a very present help, which means present in the wreckage, not waiting on the far side of it. And with others, the War Zone makes you a paradox: surrounded by people, profoundly alone, because everyone near you is either someone you serve or someone whose world would shake if they knew. That is exactly the isolation this covenant was built to end. In Refuge you are not the chaplain of your own crisis. Other women will hold the rope, and you are allowed to simply hang on.

How This Season Is Tended

An acute season is tended by stabilizing, not by processing; the deeper work belongs to a steadier day, and it will keep. What matters now is having an anchor within reach when the wave hits: breath, ground, the nearness of God made physical, and the knowledge that you do not face the two in the morning hour alone. Everything else in Refuge will still be here when the ground steadies. There is no catching up to do, no participation to perform, no pace to match. And one thing must be said with love and with clarity: this community is real support, but it is not crisis care. If you are ever in danger or in a moment you cannot get through safely, contact 911 or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline first, and let us walk with you alongside that care, not instead of it.

Begin Here

First, open your Audio Library and go to the stabilizing and anchoring practices. They are the shortest practices we have, built for the moment the wave hits. Save that page somewhere you can reach it in the middle of the night. Second, your VIM guide for this season, Healing Here: Integration, is at the link below; do not treat it as an assignment, simply let it sit near you until you are ready, because healing unfolds at the pace of love, not demand. Third, come to whichever gathering falls next, with full permission to arrive with your camera off and say nothing at all. Watch for my email; I will be in touch personally.

May you be held when you cannot hold, may refuge be more than a word to you this week, and may you discover that even here, between grief and glory, you are already held.