Courage to Choose the Storm by Kelsey Aila

My life and my heart were in turmoil. I was dealing with chronic illness, tension with my family, ripping open so many past traumas in an attempt to heal, financial struggles, and staying hopeful during a bleak and grey winter in the PNW (which is no small feat!).

I had just finished my counseling session. A session that, if we’re honest, I didn’t even want to be at that day. I didn’t feel like I had the emotional energy to sort through anything. Because I’d spent the entire past week just trying to keep my head above water while processing our last session. Because I had multiple friends who were suffering and that requires a lot from my empathetic, introverted heart. Because I was just done. I felt like I had reached a critical emotional mass and I had no idea what to do at that point. I didn’t feel like I could handle one more single emotion.

In the past when I’d reached that point I would have just shut down. I would have turned off my emotions and chosen not to engage. Or I would have avoided my friends who were suffering or my family who needed things from me as well. I wanted to do things differently, yet I had no idea how. So, instead I tried to journal and this poem emerged instead.

And though I didn’t feel any of the words I wrote in the poem, I prayed them over myself. And now I pray them over you as you read it. I pray that God would give us the courage to engage, instead of shying away. That we will trust His plans, especially when they are painful beyond our wildest imaginations. That we will know in His demolition of us, He is building something beautiful and worth the cost of every pain endured. That we can believe that this growth is worth everything that’s ripped away. And for us to be able to give ourselves grace as the architect rips away, demolishes, and rebuilds the foundations and interiors of our lives.

This rebuilding isn’t an easy or pretty process, but it’s accomplished by caring and kind hands. Hands that value you immensely. Hands that hold you through the chaos. Whatever storm you are facing, know that You are not alone. His hands are kind and still control the wind and the waves. May He give us all the courage to choose the storm.

Courage to Choose the Storm

When I want to hide my heart safely away

Far from feeling

Far from pain

Far from seeing

May you enter

Enter and bring destruction with you

Bring chaos to this order I've created

Upend my propensity for self-protection

Demolish my seeming strongholds of safety

Enter without knocking

Enter without warning

Come and change me when I want it the least

Use all your tools:

Poverty, sickness, despair, trauma, anxiety

Don't be shy in wrecking me

In your process of creating something new

Decimate me

Because your destruction

is far better

than anything I can create

for myself.

You create:

Beauty from ashes

Good from harm

Hope from despair

Give me the strength to draw in your disrepair

Give me the grace to welcome the wreckage

Give me the stamina to survive the storm

Give me courage to choose your storm.