What Feels Like Hindering Is Often The Way

​There’s a line in the song Come Out of Hiding by Steffany Gretzinger:

“And oh as you run, what hindered love will only become part of the story.”

They are words that speak to me. Because most of my life I’ve seen the things that hinder love as the problem - the fears, the mistakes, the detours, the unhealed parts that left me feeling unlovable. Unable, even, to love.

I used to think love could only begin once I got all that right. And maybe I'm still prone to thinking that way.

But it's possible I don't give love enough credit. Maybe love is far more patient and creative than that. Maybe love isn’t waiting on the other side of our healing but quietly working miracles and magic through the parts we thought disqualified us.

Maybe what feels like running from love might actually be the long, winding path of running TO it. We just don’t know it at the time. The fears that make us hide, the heartbreaks that make us cautious, even the failures that make us ashamed - maybe those are all the very things that prepare our hearts to finally recognize love when it arrives.

Because I confess, I have wondered at times - would I even recognize love if it was in front of me?

I am growing to believe that love doesn’t erase our story; it redeems it. Maybe it takes what hindered and even destroyed and weaves it into what heals, a healing that makes love suddenly recognizable. Like magic.

I can see a bit of that in my own story now. The seasons I once labeled wasted weren’t wasted at all. They were classrooms where I learned empathy. The relationships that broke me open didn’t break me apart, they broke me open, like a long awaited doorway.

With some measure of hope, I am wondering if the things I thought stood in the way were actually SHOWING me the way.

Love doesn’t wait for us to be perfect. It meets us in our running, in our confusion, in our learning. And somehow, by the time we finally stop running, love has already turned every hindrance into part of a story worth telling.

Life gets beautiful there, I believe, in this place of I have a story worth telling....