“Without the wound, he wouldn’t have searched for healing. Without the breaking, he wouldn’t have bent his knee in prayer.” Stream of Consciousness The old man sat by the stream, the soles of his feet half-submerged in the slow-moving shallow water. He had spent his entire life here, on this land and in this body that had carried him through war, love, loss, and the peculiar quiet of old age. The stream had always been there, just like the pain. He ran a hand through his coarse, silver-threaded beard and looked up at the sky, the late afternoon sun tangled in the branches of a sycamore. The wind carried the smell of damp earth and something faintly sweet, like honeysuckle in bloom. A dragonfly skimmed the surface of the water, weightless, making no mark on the current. He thought about the years spent cursing the things that had broken him—the death of his brother in the war, the fire that took his first home, the long and drawn-out illness that took the love of his life, Mary. For decades, he’d worn his grief like a heavy coat, wrapped himself in it, let it define him. He had spent nights punching at the walls, at the sky, at God himself, demanding answers, demanding fairness, demanding to be seen. But the walls never answered, and neither did the sky. Now, looking back, he saw it differently. He traced the jagged scar along his forearm, a relic of the fire that had taken everything he’d built with his hands. He had lost the house, yes—but it was in that empty stretch of years that he had learned how to listen, how to sit still, how to love without needing to hold on too tightly. Losing the house had made him unafraid to lose other things. And Mary—oh, Mary. He had spent years after her passing asking why God had given him something so precious just to take it away. But in his loneliness, he’d started talking to God the way Mary once had—like He was an old friend sitting on the porch swing. In the absence of her voice, he’d found his own. The water moved over his feet, indifferent, unstoppable. And he realized: the pain had never been a curse. It had carved him into something else, something softer, something more patient. He was grateful for it now, in a strange, quiet way. Without the wound, he wouldn’t have searched for healing. Without the breaking, he wouldn’t have bent his knee in prayer. A bird called from the sycamore, a long, low whistle, and he closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he whispered, to the sky, to the stream and then to everything that had ever tried to ruin him. And for the first time in his long, battle-worn life, he meant it. #Grief #Faith

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“Mutated”.