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We were shaped to stride through wild hills and heather, the sting of wind on our cheeks and the stars watching, sharp-eyed, overhead. Made to listen as rivers growled and threshed their way to the sea. Meant to walk where the woods thicken, where flocks of blackbirds rise, and every dew-gleamed ridge calls out our name. Yet now we crouch in walls we’ve stacked high around us, trading the bold hand of God for our own pale comforts. We have tethered ourselves, chasing ease until we’ve forgotten the bite of a raw world and the call it sings in the marrow of our bones.

And yet, this soft betrayal does not escape the gaze of the One who made us. God, who cast rivers to rage and hawthorn trees to hold fast, will not let the work of His hands waste away in cages. His voice still rushes like the gale, reaching through the haze of our forgetting. He does not call us back to ourselves—for what are we but wandering clay?—but back to Him. It is His love, rough and holy as the ground beneath sun-scorched pines, that burns the bridle clean, stripping us bare so we might stand again in His promise. I will breathe into your bones. I will break what chains you and make you as unbroken as my hills, as untamed as the storm over the sea.

His work is already begun, even as we stumble in the fields we’ve left fallow. God, who shapes kingdoms from soil and glory from ash, will set us free—not with ease but with strength, not with softness but with fire. He lifts our eyes to the jagged skylines of the hills, the crows skirling high above. So know this: His wild grace was woven into you from the start. It is His breath that stirs in the birches, His song that rises with the January wind. He comes not to soothe but to remake. And you were always His—crafted for the wide and the wondrous, where no cage can hold you. Arise and walk where the mountains remember; you are not made to shrink but to rise.