Cloud of Witnesses

In this season of my life, I have found that God brings to me scripture or stories or images that I have heard or seen my entire life but that I have never truly understood until now. And maybe because I’m stubborn and have to hear something more than once, or maybe because God just really wants me to understand the message she is trying to relay to me, she brings those scriptures, those stories, those images, to me, over and over and over again. To the point that I’m often like, “I get it, God. I get it. Really I do, so you can stop with this anytime now.”

This happened to me last summer with the story of Moses.  Moses was everywhere. Moses popped up All. The. Time. That happens sometimes when God gives you a call that is so far outside who you thought you would ever be or outside anything you thought you would ever do.  You get Moses.

The message of late for me has been the concept of the cloud of witnesses. Until recently, whenever I heard that term, I always thought of it as those saints who have gone on before us. Those persons: family, friends, teachers, others, who have made an impact on our life and on who we are as people.

It’s only been in the last couple of months or so, as I have seen that phrase again and again, in different readings, in different teachings, that I have realized that each person’s cloud of witnesses is so much more than just those who have gone before. It is those who walk beside.

I am working my way through a book right now that is a very painful one for me. I can’t read much of it at a sitting and I have to put it aside after a couple of days before I can go back to it again, because it strips bare so many of my ideas about who I have envisioned myself to be because of my trauma, and makes me look at who I really am under that and who it is that God sees. And that is painful, soul-shattering, yet ultimately soul-healing, kind of work.

One of the things that I read in this book a couple of weeks ago that has stuck with me in a powerful and meaningful way is the following quote: “the ‘cloud of witnesses’ is a large body of real people whose job it is to cheer us on to faith and wholeness. Their light illumines our darkness. Their warmth brings comfort and hope on cold, hard days.”

That quote is the best definition of deep friendship that I have ever read except that it is really so much more. Those who walk beside us, who truly walk beside us, are so much more than just our friends. Those whose “job it is to cheer us on to faith and wholeness” become our families in ways that our blood relatives rarely can.

Those whose light illumines our darkness and whose warmth brings comfort and hope on cold, hard days, are the most special people who allow God to use them  to be the hands and feet of Jesus to us in a real way each and every day.

I am so blessed by an incredible cloud of witnesses. A group of women who literally surround me with their wisdom, and their ears, and their love.

A group of women who tell me things I don’t always want to hear and make me listen to them when I would rather not.

A group of women who tell me they love me, and continue to tell me they love me, because they know that a large part of me doesn’t believe them because I don’t think I’m worthy of that love.

A group of women who are teaching me, in their deep love for me, and in my deep love for them, how to love myself in ways that I never have.

A group of women who value me in ways I don’t value myself, and see worth in me I sometimes refuse to recognize. A group of women who are teaching me to recognize that value and worth in myself.

A group of women who will give up their time, their sleep, even cookies, and comfort, to sit with me in coffee shops, on hard floors, and dock benches, and stairwells, and truck beds, so that they can listen to me as I talk, or hold me as I cry.

A group of women who recognize when I am having a bad day and am just heavy, who will text me during the day just to see how I am, who will invade my personal space, and co-cuddle me in the most awkward of ways, when I so desperately need healing, safe, and positive touch, but I’m too afraid to ask for it.

A group of women who will rub my back, and hug me tight, and just sit with me, without words, so that I don’t have to be alone.

A group of women who I have come to trust to hold my hands and hold my heart in ways I have never allowed anyone to do before.

A group of women who have vowed to chase me down if I run away from them, as is my instinct when I allow someone to get too close to the inner core of who I am.

A group of women who have adopted me and who have become the sisters that I always wanted but never had.

This a story I am grateful that God has brought to me again and again. A story that I will never get tired of hearing. Or tired of telling. Or tired of living.

This is my cloud of witnesses.