Spark.

I started writing this when thinking about PTSD, then realized about halfway through that I was really writing it for someone close to me who is fighting an on-going battle with illness of a different sort. This is for them, with much love.

Spark

The terror hits you,
sinks into your bones, icy and harsh,
turning your blood to fire and ice.

You freeze as the fear consumes you,
your vision fills with vestiges
of horrors, catastrophes
and terrors, large and small.

Your eyes squeeze shut against them,
your body tenses against the barrage of potential pain,
and your thoughts race for a way out.

They find none.

Death seems inevitable, and not so much an earthly death,
but a spiritual one,
a death born of not loving others,
of becoming so lost in this pain
you can't see beyond yourself.

It's all you can do to hold onto hope.

But my dear one,
you must keep your eyes open to see it.
Hope is in Him, in His light!
Even in this blackness, it shines.

You must look past the shattered images,
breathe through the panic,
stand up against the deadweight of despair.
Can you see?

His light works through the cracks,
through the walls that seem to reach the sky.
His love consumes the fear that consumed you;
Nothing can contain His fire.

Look for His light,
even if all you see in the moment is a spark,
for that spark is part of an unending source
of light, of love, of salvation.

See the light, hold onto it with all your might,
even as the anxieties and lies assail you,
luring you to sink back
into their hopelessness.

Hold on!
They cannot consume or defeat you,
You, who are bright and beautiful,
a creature of the Divine.

Hold onto the spark.
watch it as it grows with your awareness,
glowing brighter and bigger,
until it becomes the Sun itself.

It will shut out all that scares you,
all that makes you cower.
It will burn so lovingly, so fiercely,
that in time it will be all you see, all you are.

And my darling,
if the darkness comes back,
never fear.

The light will save you.

Again, and again, and again.

A spark is all it takes.