"In the Garden of Us"
I am a wild rose with thorns, unseen,
rooted in soil where storms once grew,
my branches reaching toward the sun,
yet curled in the shadow of the crowd.
Lord, my breath is a whispered prayer:
“Let me bloom where the gardeners take root,
where the soil is fertile, and the hands are kind,
not a field of judgment, but a home I can trust.”
They see the cracks in my quiet shell,
the fractures where light once tried to enter,
and name me broken, a relic left in the earth—
but You, O Love, know the map of my scars,
how each ache is a river leading home,
how my heart, though unspoken, is yours.
I’ve carried the weight of “other” for miles,
a ghost in the chorus of laughter and kin,
my voice a breath when the world demands song.
Yet in every crowd, I am a question mark,
a girl who learned to wear invisibility
as a cloak, a shield, a second skin.
But here, in the hush of holy ground,
where You write on my palms with a lover’s ink,
I learn to belong—not to a place,
but to the stillness where I am whole.
Your arms are the first table I’ve known,
where the broken bread is always mine.
Still, I ache for the human dance,
for hands that hold my shyness as sacred,
for communities where my quiet makes space,
not an excuse to turn away.
Not the flawed child, but the woman who grieves,
who loves in the language of roots, not sound.
Maybe the world will always be a puzzle
where my pieces fit a little lopsided.
But You, who knit me from midnight and dew,
say, “This is where I have placed you—
in the wildness of not-yet-understood,
in the hush where my heartbeat answers yours.”
So I’ll keep reaching, my thorns tucked close,
growing toward the light of the One who planted me.
And when the gardeners finally see my name,
they’ll read it in the lines of my grace—
“She belonged all along,” the wind will say,
“though she waited to find her place.”
