09/04/2026
PROMISED LAND
At first we reached for distant light while standing in the living day,
And turned our blessings into dust by dreaming all our joy away.
We thought that wanting proved our faith, that longing pulled the future near,
Not seeing how a hungry heart can make the heavens disappear.
We named our lack in careful words and called it vision, growth, and grace,
Yet every time we compared now, we pushed our peace so far away.
We measured life by someday’s height and found today too small to trust,
Until the soul, still rich with love, felt poor beneath the watching judge.
Then wisdom came, not like a crown, but like a veil unpinned at last,
A quiet loosening in the chest, a softer reading of the past.
We saw the wound, the waiting room, the doors that closed, the hands that fell,
Had shaped in us a deeper ground than easy roads could ever tell.
The loss was not an empty theft, the pause was not some barren land,
Each sorrow carved a wider bowl and placed more mercy in our hands.
We blessed the breath, the broken road, the ache that taught the heart to see,
And in that gentler field within, resistance lost its grip of need.
So now we do not beg the world to prove that we are worthy first,
We tend the tone beneath the thought, and quench the spirit’s older thirst.
We thank the rain, the dust, the dark, the love that left, the love that stayed,
And from that peace, a truer life begins to rise without parade.
For all the years we chased a shore beyond the borders of our pain,
The promised land was never somewhere waiting past the wind and rain.
It was the world we could not see while looking everywhere above,
A holy ground inside the heart, made visible from all our love.
Heather Lea
Artwork found on Pinterest
