I was waiting for a better version of me. Thinner, more accomplished, minus the hundred tiny shards of awkwardness crowding my chest every time I entered a room.

I was waiting for her for half my life, but she never arrived.

She wasn’t real, after all, but a whisper of longing and sometimes harsh expectations, drifting through the revolving doors of someday and maybe next time.

I’m sorry for the waiting now, for the hole her absence left in me. For the way shame circled slowly around her shoulds and shouldn’ts.

I’m sorry because sometimes the waiting overshadowed the riches of what was real: the sanctuary of knowing and being known; the welcome into life gladly shared; participation in the grand, gritty chaos of existence.

I’ve heard other women talk about their own unseen critics, the ones who magnify their flaws and downplay their unique beauty. The ones who keep them waiting for a break, for a man, for someone else’s blessing instead of courageously welcoming their own calling.

We are quick to believe the enemy’s voice and slow to rest in the truth of a love that gave everything to draw us in. Why is that?

Perhaps the lies sound reasonable when we look in the mirror, while we shade our eyes to the dazzling, impossible love flung across the night sky and whispered into our hiddenness.

I stepped outside to breathe thanks into the cold night air this week, whispering my gratitude for God’s keeping through the years of seeking and finding that brought me here under the heavens in a night brimming with glory.

The aurora danced above me, reminding me of the mystery and adventure of each breath taken under a sky throbbing with wonder. A sky speaking of life beyond life, someday.

I was waiting for a woman who would have been unsuited to the life that both fills me and waits for me, it’s warmth filling the places that hungered for the thin porridge of acceptance not long before.

A life that finds me here, under the dancing aurora, on my way to a someday made rich because of all the days that came before. A life whose every drop filled a cup now spilling over with sweetness as I lift my eyes to Heaven.

Who are you waiting for under your own night sky? Whose words became your own, holding you back from abandoning yourself to wonder? Let His voice cover them; the song He sings over us drowning yesterday’s deception.

Open your eyes, your heart, and your Bible to bask in the beauty of a love that chooses and cherishes even you, wherever you are. Even me. Our waiting is over.

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.
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Ephesians 1:17-19