In the village, we walked to church in the dark. No street lights on our road. Just lanterns, and the sound of boots on wet ground, and maybe forty or fifty people walking quietly together through the fields. Children half-asleep on their fathers' shoulders. Old women in headscarves who had done this walk for sixty years and would do it sixty more if God allowed.

Nobody spoke much. There was nothing to say. The walk itself was the prayer.

I think about that walk every year. I think about how those women — my grandmother, her sisters, the neighbors whose names I barely remember now — carried something in them that had nothing to do with youth or beauty or circumstance. They carried certainty. A deep, rooted, unshakeable certainty that this night mattered 🌾

I am not old. But I am no longer young either. And I notice that certainty slowly settling into my own bones the same way it settled into theirs.

You cannot rush it. You cannot buy it. You can only live long enough and honestly enough for it to find you

Do you think faith is something you choose, or something that simply grows in you over time?