There will be a season when you have done all you know to do and still, nothing. No answer at the door. No sudden change. No sign in the sky telling you that tomorrow will be kinder. Just you, your unanswered prayer, and the strange silence that makes you question whether God is still listening. He is. Do not mistake silence for absence. Some of God's deepest work happens without making a sound. Roots grow in darkness. Healing happens beneath skin. Morning begins long before the window knows there is light. And somewhere beyond what you can see, your life is being moved by hands you cannot follow. So do not abandon your faith because you cannot trace God's footsteps. You were never promised a clear view. You were given enough light for the next step. Take it. Even if your knees shake. Even if your heart has questions your mouth is afraid to ask. Take it. Faith is not a life without uncertainty. It is waking up with uncertainty beside you and refusing to let it choose your direc...
No mercy within,
only the quiet arithmetic of harm,
where evil moves in polished shoes
and pretence carries the lantern.
It is the gentle voice
that sharpens the blade,
the smiling mouth
that buries the oath.
Thus the path is led,
not by stars,
but by shadows trained to look like light.
And still the road narrows.
It tightens into a corridor of thorns,
each step a covenant with pain,
each breath, a wager
against the dark.
Life though,
what a bitter tutor.
How do we live
in a world so fluent in cruelty?
Where trust lies pale and unattended,
a fallen monument no one tends;
where truth survives only in thin ribbons,
fragile as winter sunlight,
threaded through words
that tremble
because they are not born of the heart,
oh no.
Not from the heart.
From habit.
From hunger.
From the instinct to endure.
We speak in measured syllables,
ration our faith,
hide our tenderness
as though it were contraband.
We learn to walk the narrow way
with bleeding feet
and call it wisdom.
Yet somewhere,
beneath the thorns,
beneath the staged intentions,
beneath the long apprenticeship of distrust,
a stubborn ember refuses extinction.
For even in a cruel world,
to ask how we live
is already an act of defiance.
To seek truth,
though it be thin as a whisper,
is to widen the path by one breath.
Life though,
merciless, magnificent paradox,
it wounds,
it withholds,
it deceives,
and still
it waits to see
whether we will answer darkness
with its own language,
or dare—against reason,
to speak from the heart.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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