What does it mean to hold cupped hands out, life trickling through fingers, splashing on the ground below, an iridescent liquid mixing with dust? What does it mean to live a given life, to break open the inner chamber again and again, to watch the fissures spread like spider webs?

I sell flowers on hot asphalt. A wind comes up and my canopy skitters along the ground; weights were not among the dozens of items I remembered to bring along. A woman appears out of nowhere, running up to my table, jamming a canopy leg under my ice chest. “There, I think that will work,” she pants. “What lovely flowers you have!” She has kind eyes. You know they’ve crinkled in laughter and softened in sympathy countless times.

Malayna sets up a table beside ours at Farmer’s Market. She sells big fragrant bunches of lavender, both dried and fresh. She says something sweet and appropriate to everyone who walks past. “I like your shirt!” “Wow, you boys all have matching bill caps; that is so cool.”

“I grow some flowers too,” she tells me, “but I really love lavender. I hope we run into each other again sometime!”

Me too.

Dixie’s face lights up when she sees Eva and I. She remembers our names, brushes her graying hair away from her face, and buys pies and flowers. Her husband’s head seems to be on the level with the oak trees shading the park. He ambles over and his carbonated laughter is so contagious everyone around him vibrates in mirth.

Bee has short blond hair and an adorable accent. When I learn her name, I wonder if her parents saw the colorful, cheerful woman she would become. If I caught a sparkle of sunshiny pollen in her hair, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I have friends who take me out for coffee, gift beautiful words, share their time, opinions, hearts. They give me wildly exaggerated compliments. I get whole armloads of love dumped on me with careless abandon. I catch glimpses of lives poured out on altars, vulnerable and broken and given.

This is the heavenly paradox: the more you break, the more beauty glistens through the cracks. Cupped hands not only give, but also receive grace upon grace.

Two words bridge the distance between two worlds—our crumbling, hurtling rock and the land where one can breathe without toxic panic. Every time we say these words, we move closer to the country where anxiety’s taloned claws writhe for an eternity below, where giving and receiving are so intertwined you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. Two words hold all the dreams ever dreamed, all the kingdoms ever conquered, all the Truth ever discovered.

Thank you.