Safe spaces

I have a tendency towards anxiety and worry. Towards the worst outcome and the largest failing.

My body has a tendency to physically take over me and stop me when it feels threatened, whether from the thoughts in my head or the reality in the world.

So I like safe spaces.

Whenever I move, all the different times, I make a space safe for myself, create somewhere - even if it is a chair in the corner or the bed I sleep on - that is mine.

A place I can retreat to.

A place that will remain as I need it to, and be my familiar safe space.

I’m a thirty year old who would happily spend her life staying at her families homes and fitting into their lives where I know I am safe from the world and the difficulties and anxieties it brings…because I am the youngest, a forever child in the family, who will always be the last to experience life and can learn and hide behind my family.

Except I’m not.

I am all of the things above but also I am none of them.

I am a 30 year old who chose to live 6 years of my twenties in a foreign country, with little money and working with people who lived in circumstances beyond my full understanding.

A women who moved back to England to a strange city knowing a grand total of 3 people; to a flat and a job she knew little about.

I am a women who chose at a young age to say yes to a God I believe in and to firmly stick to the promise that she would follow that God around the world if He asked her to...and I have.

God is the only reason I have for being able to move across the world, the only reason I have for being able to step outside of my families homes and live my own life.

He is the only reason.

Because He is a constant safe space.

My ability to create a physical safe space wherever I go does not help me when I am in the middle of a city I know nothing about, in a room of people I do not know.

It does not help me when I feel panicked on a train or plane or shopping center.

My ability to create safe spaces in rooms and homes does not help me in the middle of anxiety and worry and fear.

God does.

My safe spaces are spaces I don’t always want others to enter because they are mine, invisible lines surround them that make me feel like the world cannot get in.

That is what I see in my relationship with God.

I find it hard to explain to those who have no experience of Him or do not believe in Him because to me; He is my only true safe space.

Where I am not judged or rejected for the way my brain functions or how my body reacts, where I am not told to get over it, where I do not feel the heavy need to stay strong and move on.

He is the place where my weakness is accepted and the one who gentle renews my strength; the one who promises a new dawn and who lifts the weights up off my shoulders.

So sometimes I jealously do not want to share Him.

But today He reminded me that sharing Him does not take anything away from the safe space He created for me.

It does not let other people beyond those invisible lines I have around my relationship with Him.

Sharing Him and who I know Him to be allows others to have the safest space too.

He is the safest space because He is our home, the place where we originated from and the image after which we were formed.

I promise He is the safest space, who meets you where you are at and in the way that you need.

You are known.

You are loved.

He is the safest place you will ever know.

R/