It is never as bad as you think. Just as you imagine yourself utterly thrown, defeated, in want of nothing but the passing of time into the next part of your life, just as you pretend that your heart is so broken it will never function, just as you want to think that it is all dispairingly, painfully over and that the world has ceased to turn, stop. Not quite- it stops itself, you see. Or something stops you.

Perhaps it is the children that play on the pavement below you, double dutch and hop scotch. Or the couple in the corner, laughing, crying, living, disagreeing and holding hands. The toddler on the swing, fear and delight escaping her little lungs all at once, or the look in a mother's eyes when her child trips over a stone.

Doesn't it stop you? When all else has, when all else has ceased (or seized) you and squeezed the breathless life out of you, won't you let something this small stop you? Stop! And realise that it is never as bad as you think it is.

Some things in life will bowl you over with a feather; so great is their power from so small an effort. A mother who kneels by her sleeping child's bed, a father whose tears fall in compassion, regret, heartache and great love. Some things come at you with guns and knives and you play along, you silly fool, you play along and you fall. These things have pain written all over them, they come with warning, you know their plan. Yet you, I, we fall, all at once, and succumb to the wrong things with the lesser power. If only we could recognise the subtle authority of love and learn to recognise it all the time.

Then, without doubt, we would feast daily our eyes and souls on Love, on Him, and not on the silly arrows we shoot at each other, unknowingly, knowingly, painfully, intentionally, unintentionally.

So if you ever think you have come to the end of the line, that the last song has been sung and you've heaped the last straw on your camel's back, tarry. Tarry just a little while. Look out your window, or drive to the nearest hospital, playground, pottery house, florist, or what have you. Scroll down a yahoo newspage. Watch. Watch as the world carries on inspite of it all, inspite of you, really. And know that the God who will not let a sparrow fall without His consent will lovingly gather you in His comforting shadow.

For what are shadows, really, when they can be reduced to dots? (ref.- Mr. God, this is Anna) And in the same way, how much more can we be expanded? The final expansion is none other than the Creator Himself.

Blessing, Honour, Glory and Power, Forever.