Jessica Stanley

Praying in agreement for the only right thing for humanity to do. Humanity is the only part of Creation that looks at the stars and weeps, not because we are lost, but because we recognize beauty we did not make and feel the deep gratitude we somehow belong to it anyway. We are the creatures who bury our dead with flowers. Who sit with the dying so they don’t go alone. Who write letters to people we’ll never meet, hoping the words will find someone who needs them. We build masterpieces we won’t live to see finished. We plant trees in whose shade we will never sit. We sing lullabies to children with a love greater than the need for our next breath to survive. We are the only species that grieves injustice on behalf of strangers, across time, across ocean, across every line that should have made us indifferent. And here is the strangest, most stunning thing: we know we are broken, and we try anyway. We fail each other terribly, and still, in the very next moment, someone pulls a stranger from a burning car. Someone stays up all night translating a poem so another culture can feel what they felt. Someone writes the truth when it would have been so much easier to stay quiet. Our shadow falls on everything we’ve ever loved, and we have loved so much. We’ve loved enough to fight for humanity in the face of the human race’s greatest threat. May we never forget and never, ever give up.

🙏🏼✨💓

Only one person on this platform knows exactly what went down in 2020 when I lost my job, my ministry. A pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Receiving this comment last night, six years later, was such a soul balm. Speak light, speak life.

🎯

Well, ya don't say 🙄

wwg1wga

7:11

Eeesh. Spicy moods never turn out well for reflecting the healing work I’ve done. Spicy mode off, Jess. Spicy mode off, for your own sake 😅

As if October wasn't 🔥 enough, things sure seem to be reaching a boiling point. Maybe even a boiling over point. Heck, what do I know.

There is little to compare with the helplessness and the pain of driving down the road in your hometown and seeing a family member on the side of the road in this condition. And all you can do is keep on driving, for your own safety and that of your children. I still check the gazette FB page to see if he's been arrested...again. It is my one way of knowing he's still alive. A few years ago someone recorded him in a state much like the person in this video, and posted it for clicks and giggles. So many laughing comments. It wasn't funny to me. His father was addicted, too, my entire life and certainly years before I was born. Just a different kind of fix. In the 80s, c*caine was so rampant. Then that habit turned into a spoon and a lighter. I loved my uncle as much as I love his son. I hate what the demon conducting the train took from them, from me, from our family. Which reminds me... my uncle wrote a book called The Train. He drew the cover design of the devil in a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots, leaning against a railway train. He mailed it from jail, handwritten, part by part. It was brilliant. He, actually was brilliant. I was supposed to type it all up on my typewriter and someone in the family was supposed to get it to a publisher. We never did...and I don't know where those handwritten pages are now. He got out of jail (again) and I have the sweetest memory of him making me a butter pecan milkshake in a little apartment the family helped get him set up in. I thought maybe this time, it would work out. Maybe I could have a Thanskgiving and Christmas memory with him in it. But, he was already dying. He passed away in hospice care. The day before, my grandfather was wheeling him through the outdoor gardens. We were all there...time ticks. My uncle asked to stop, climbed out of his wheelchair and crawled over to a spickett. He cried and asked God to forgive him, to save him, and for the first time, he acknowledged that Jesus was real. I will never forget the squeaky sound of that darn spickett or the sight of my uncle lying on grass, trying to be baptized in the water flowing. He passed the next day. Sometimes, when I go home, I still think I see him walking down the road. Addiction has taken so many family members from me, even if they are still alive. And, since a child, I wondered, who is profiting from this? How does it keep spreading? And now I know. Always follow the money. And if any of this made you see things differently, maybe don't laugh at the videos of people cranked, zoomed, etc. out of their minds. I can promise you, it isn't funny at all.

wwg1wga