There have been seasons in my life where I have struggled to sense God with me. I've clung to knowledge of God, but deeply wanted and needed that feeling of God's presence. What got me through those seasons was the way God showed up through other peoples' love and care. Sometimes it looked like a casserole. Other times, a grocery delivery, or a task taken off my agenda, or a friend sitting and watching something streamed on tv.

This week, a beloved husband and father in our community died unexpectedly and a family's whole world rearranged itself overnight.

Here is what I have watched since. The meal train filled up before it was even created. Casseroles, and then more casseroles. Somebody sat in a kitchen and did not say one wise thing. Another went along for difficult errands. Others came with hugs and veggie trays. Teenagers took their friend out for breakfast. People with their own worries and their own long days kept showing up with a dish in hand and a willingness to stand in the quiet. Nobody could fix it, and nobody pretended to. They came anyway.

I don't want to tidy that up. The loss is real, and all that love does not shrink it. But the love is real too, and I keep coming back to the idea that it may be the most honest thing I know about where the sacred lives. It isn't floating somewhere above the hurting. It moves through hands, and doorways, and phone calls, and works through whoever is willing.

And that presence has also been busy elsewhere this week. A new ministry is taking shape for folks in our community who need it at this stage of life, a place being made ready before many of them even knew they were looking. Possibility has a way of swinging wide, bigger than any of us planned, and what waits on the other side isn't for any one person. It's for the neighbor who needs somewhere to go, someone to sit beside, a table with a place already set. Different shape, same love. Same God, showing up through people.

Maybe you are in a season right now where you can't feel any of it. I get it. You don't have to feel it for it to be true. Sometimes the only thing asked of you is to open the door when someone knocks with a dish in their hands.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you let yourself be carried by someone's love, and that when you are able, you carry someone else's. A casserole, a ride, an hour on the couch with the tv on and nothing to fix. And may you notice that the holy has been in the room the whole time. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa