The Light Does Not Ask You to Shrink

It is late, and the mirror is still lit while the rest of the house sleeps. You are rehearsing an apology for taking up space, for being too much, for making the air heavy just by breathing it.

You stare at your own reflection, trying to find the version of yourself that wouldn't make everyone uncomfortable, the version that knows how to be small. But the light does not ask you to shrink.

Jesus stood at the door of a man named Zacchaeus—a man the whole town hated for being too greedy, too short, too traitorous—and He did not ask him to change before coming in. He said: I must stay at your house today.

He invited Himself into the mess before the apology was even spoken. The light is not uncomfortable with your size.

It is not weary of your weight. It came to dwell in the very places you are trying to edit out of your story.

You do not need to become someone else to be loved; you need to stop hiding the one who is already here. The person in the mirror is not a problem to be solved; they are the very address where the light has chosen to live.