Inside the small circle of every heart there is a cosmos. A cosmos that interprets all the dimensions of the universe outside. A cosmos where joy and pain are reflected on invisible signboards, but where there are also slum-quarters with shacks, and sought-after, prime-position real estate. A person builds shacks every time you react negatively to being hurt or to friction. And every good deed and every small mercy flattens one of those shacks. So we are all builders. On our own emotional structures. Or co-builders on one another's structures.

Under the pruning shears of other people's tongues, expectations or personalities, a great deal can, in the end, be shaped in how we [not quite sure what she meant here], alienating us from our own being and at last from our predestined lot. Too tired, too hurried, too involved or too demoralised, we are eventually either so drained or so twisted that our own core — worn thin — can no longer stand up. All the pruning perhaps makes for a tidy display, but without spark or soul or integrity.

You can grow long, sharp thorns to protect the small flame, but that makes your own fragrance inaccessible, more even to yourself than to others. Learn rather to be nimble. Become comfortable with confrontation, with change and with friction. Sometimes the Lord unsettles us out of who and what we have been for a good reason.

Grow resolutely back in the places where people or circumstances have pruned unnecessarily hard. Grow back enough so that the distance between the pruning shears and your tender shoots becomes wider and larger. See to it that your soft sides, which bruise easily and wilt quickly, become invisible to everyone with a sharp pronouncement and a blind insight. A person must learn how to hide her source of life and to keep herself resilient. And not to grow thorns. Because there where we have been wounded, or where we wound others, integrity drains out — the integrity of loving, the integrity of beautifying, the integrity of caring.

We are all splinters of God's great plan, and sometimes we flounder along trying to find the little spaces and the little pieces inside of which we can become whole in ourselves and whole in our circumstances, in context. Mutual approachability is the glue that brings the shards and the islands back together again, there where it is so destined, to make our own reality meaningful once more.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer