Diving.

On Sunday, an elder prayed for me and my family. We stood in the hot grass in front of the lake and wrapped our arms around each other and he prayed. He prayed something about waking up with eternity written on our eyelids, but what struck me the hardest was when he prayed for me.
That I would go deeper.
I stood there for a second when he said it, my breath caught in my throat as I barely mouthed the word after he said it. Deeper, I whispered. And then I said it again, just to reassure me.

Deeper.

There was a time when that word meant nothing to me. I had no experience with it. It was useless. I was as deep as I could go. At least I thought I was. Depth was a foreign concept to me. Little did I know then, I had only scraped the surface of my carpenter + His grace. There would come a time later in my life when I would suddenly pry my fingers from my face and look and see and then actually dive. Because all that time I had been treading water, and I thought I was standing.
Sometimes the earth we feel underneath our feet isn't really there.

On Sunday, I loved hearing someone pray those words over me, but better yet, I loved more that they meant something to me. I got excited, tears creeping out of the corners of my eyes and sweat making my hair stick to the back of my neck and the sun, the ever insistent sun beating down. The beauty in that prayer was not that someone else prayed for me to go deeper. The beauty was that I knew I could, that I wanted to, that I was capable.
I can go deeper, I said to myself as I went back after he had finished and I sat on a hardwood picnic table that poked splinters into my thighs.

I can go deeper, I said it this morning too.
Because I believe it. I know it.