The ache you have been medicating with everything except God is not a wound. It is a witness. It has been telling the truth about you since before you had words for it.

Holiness didn’t wait for you to be strong—it met you in the water. And every day since, God has been bending your desires away from the old self and toward the joy you tasted when your sins were washed away. Transformation is not a finish line. It is the daily death of self and the daily resurrection of hope.