The Fluency of Hope - A student of grace, seeking wonder, becoming fluent in the language of hope.

To Feel Again: The Tedium of Surviving

January 17, 2019 By Alia Joy

More than anything, surviving is tedious. It is a million small breaths strung together. It is a million neurons and synapses and chemical reactions trying to rearrange themselves and play nice. It is day after day of in-between spaces. Somewhere between the living and the dead is where the tedium of surviving resides. It is the upside-down. The shadow world. The shadow’s body and mind. I am a sleepwalker who never sleeps. I got out of bed for a couple… Read more

Living In The Tension of Beauty and Pain

December 27, 2018 By Alia Joy

I’ve been mostly absent from social media for the past week. There are seasons where I come and go. I hurt my back and my lungs haven’t been clear and sometimes the pain in my life makes me hostile. Near constant pain is exhausting and sometimes it makes me tender to the world, charitable and generous because I know what it is to hurt. But sometimes it just makes me bitter. Social media can be a treacherous terrain when I’m… Read more

Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit For They Will Lead the Way

December 13, 2018 By Alia Joy

Advent is here. We are straining forward each day with anticipation. But still, this season of darkness and yearning is upon me. The early day’s sun retreats leaving a smattering of white twinkling lights strung in rows across the tree like fingerprints. The candle’s flesh is melting down its sides like shedding skin and it flickers a great hope in the darkness. I can’t help but feel my sickness is an assault on God’s goodness trying to blind me to… Read more

Grieving Our Celebrations

December 6, 2018 By Alia Joy

I grieve every Christmas. I miss my dad the most this time of year. His birthday is the 29th of December and he almost lived to 60, but then he didn’t. He died a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, eight years ago. Grief always seemed so out of place with Christmas fast approaching. I believed it was somehow ungrateful to approach Christmas and the gift of a Savior and King with anything less than unbridled joy. It seemed cheap and… Read more

Maybe Someday: On Deserts and Dreams Deferred

November 30, 2018 By Alia Joy

Every year when the sun climbs into the horizon and sets over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a gathering of poets and prophets, writers and artists gather. I have always wanted to go. My browser sits open to their website, and I skim over the details. It claims to be equal parts spiritual retreat, artist workshop, and festival. It is the conference I have most wanted to attend since I started this online journey of sharing my words and baring… Read more

Tasked With Wonder

November 28, 2018 By Alia Joy

It’s true. Sometimes I tire of the poets and I want plain words. Unhurried, slow words with lazy syllables. Maybe even stilted words that fall like heavy bricks and land with a singular purpose. But even then, I just fed you a simile, though filled with clay and dust. Words are busy little things, so much more than the feel in your mouth as you roll the letters down your tongue or march them through your teeth. They are meaning… Read more

Bipolar Is A Riptide: Breathing Lessons

November 19, 2018 By Alia Joy

I’ve written before that ~I write like a woman drowning. I write with a desperation to know and be known, to understand God, to see glory. I write to breathe again.~ I’ve been breathless lately. Mental illness is a riptide on otherwise calm shores. It is the pull of deep waters lulling you further and further from safe and sturdy ground, all at once weightless and buoyant, caressed by the lapping tides. It invites you to surrender, to be carried… Read more

For Better or for Worse, Till Death Do Us Part: A Warbler’s Hope

November 16, 2018 By Alia Joy

On my 20th anniversary, last May, I do what I did the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. I try to keep breathing. I inherited my mother’s brown eyes, my father’s broad flat feet and from both of them, poor lungs. Asthma. I gather my lips around my inhaler, like a scuba diver on dry land, inhaling two puffs of albuterol while I hold in the medicine that makes my world expand again…. Read more

Bear Witness: You Have Seen God

November 1, 2018 By Alia Joy

My word of the day app keeps opening to the word fenestrated. I look up the definition because while I consider myself well read, fenestrated is a jumble of foreign syllables to me. It says provided with a window or windows. I look out the windows. The dark still awaits the break of dawn and the moon everyone is posting on Instagram is nowhere to be seen. I don’t know why my view is lacking, but it is. There is nothing… Read more