The Head That Moves the Body

The Pause

Before you begin,
release the effort to become anything.

What follows does not ask you to try.

It only asks you to notice.

For a long time, I believed faith meant effort.
Trying harder to love.
Trying to forgive.
Trying to respond rightly.

Even when I spoke of grace,
there was still a subtle strain —
as though life depended on my willingness
to perform it well.

Then something shifted.

Not suddenly.
Not dramatically.
Just quietly.

I realized I was not meant to be the source.

If Christ is the Head,
then love is not something I generate.
Forgiveness is not something I summon.
Compassion is not something I decide to produce.

They are movements.

They arrive.

The body does not initiate life.
It responds to it.

The hand does not argue with the head.
The arm does not rehearse obedience.
When the head moves, the body follows —
not by effort,
but by union.

What I once called discipline
was often just separation in disguise.

I was still trying to do something for God,
rather than recognizing what God was already doing through me.

And as that striving loosened its grip,
something became easier to recognize:
love no longer needed to be managed,
forgiveness no longer required delay,
action no longer waited to be measured.

Not because anything was completed in me —
but because resistance had less to hold on to.

This was not passivity.
It was participation.

I did not disappear.
I was included.

Like a body remembering its own life —
not once and for all,
but again and again.

I no longer ask,
“How should I respond?”

I listen instead
for what is already moving.

And when it moves,
I move with it.

Under the Sun / Beyond the Sun

You are not late.
You are not failing.

You are not the source.

The Head has never stopped speaking.
The body has never been abandoned.

Rest.

Life knows how to live itself.