N8tivegirl

Your Spirit Still Lingers

Valrelyn

There are presences that do not leave when bodies do.

There are loves that refuse to dissolve with time.

Your spirit lingers — not in haunting, but in imprint.

In the quiet strength I didn’t know you were building in me.

In the way I still pause before decisions, wondering what you would say.

In the courage I borrow when mine feels thin.

There was a time I thought I would not survive your absence.

Grief felt like an ocean with no shoreline.

I kept reaching backward — replaying conversations, rewriting endings,

wishing I could return to the version of life where you were still within reach.

But time does not bend for longing.

And somewhere between the ache and the silence,

I realized something holy:

What lingers is not loss.

It is love.

I used to stand before God as if I were shattered beyond repair —

a broken vessel asking to be glued back together exactly as I was.

But healing does not work that way.

The Potter does not restore cracked clay by preserving every fracture.

He reshapes.

He reforms.

He makes new.

I once begged for yesterday.

Now I understand that yesterday could never hold what God has prepared for me.

There was no more room in my past.

I had been trying to pour new wine into old skin —

clinging to memories that had already stretched me beyond capacity.

But old skin cannot expand.

It bursts under the pressure of what is becoming.

And I am becoming.

Becoming stronger.

Becoming softer.

Becoming whole in ways I did not know I was broken.

I think of the woman who reached for the hem of His garment.

She was not healed because of proximity.

She was healed because she believed before she touched.

Faith does not deny pain.

It simply refuses to let pain have the final word.

There was a season when I felt abandoned —

like the silence of Gethsemane echoed in my own prayers.

But even in the garden, surrender came before resurrection.

And so I surrendered.

Not because it was easy.

But because holding on was heavier.

I released the version of life I thought I needed.

I kissed that era goodbye.

I stopped romanticizing what God had already removed.

Ashes are not meant to be cradled.

They are meant to fertilize what grows next.

He did not return what I lost.

He transformed me through what I lost.

And now when I feel your spirit linger,

it no longer pulls me backward.

It steadies me forward.

Love that is anchored in God does not expire.

It evolves.

It deepens.

It prepares us for what is ahead.

I am no longer a broken vessel begging to survive.

I am clay in capable hands.

And when the pressure feels tight —

when the fermentation stage stretches my faith —

I remember:

New wine expands.

So do I.

I trust the One who reshapes me.

I trust the One who restores what fire tried to consume.

I trust the One who turns ashes into beauty —

and memory into strength.

Your spirit lingers.

Not to keep me in yesterday,

but to remind me that love — real love —

never dies.

It simply becomes.