Dear Little Feather,

You’ll be getting busy very soon. At some points you’ll feel that it’s far too much for you to handle. Maybe you won’t just feel tired, you’ll start to think ahead and try to see a way for the pressure to stop, and maybe you won’t be able to picture it.

When that moment comes, you might feel angry, or bitter. You might wonder why the older you get, the less you’re treated like someone who is loved, and more like someone that has to perform and work hard – or else. Like a resource to be harvested, or like fuel for some awful machine that runs on everyone’s misery.

And when you do that, maybe you’ll just accept it even if you don’t like it, and work harder and harder and harder. Or maybe you’ll grow bitter like I did, and in your bitterness you might want to give up, but you can’t. 

It’s probably a good thing that you feel unhappy about this – the truth is, there is a machine out there that squishes and crushes people, and treats them like fuel. It’s out there on the streets if you look hard enough, and it’s all over the news. 

Part of growing up means recognising that this machine is out there, and that it does run everything. All people are forced to work, and perform, and deliver – or else. Some of it is needed, because say all that hard work pays for our food, our doctors, our roads. But you gotta wonder sometimes why it has to hurt so much.

Now let me tell you a Christian view on this. If you don’t want to hear it, that’s ok; feel free to stop here, I’m glad you’ve stuck around till this point, and I hope you find a way to get through things.

But here it is: we live in a broken world, and even if many people and things around us were put there to be good – our parents, our friends, the people in charge of us – they can sometimes end up crushing us. Because everyone, you and them, lives under this machine, this machine telling us that because hunger and pain are real, we must work hard to avoid those things.

Hunger and pressure and pain are real. The machine is real. 

But they’re not as real as God. 

It seems like a fairytale, but there’s something realer than hunger, pressure, pain, and sickness, even if those things are very, very real. 

These things can control us, and we need to react to them, but it won’t always be like this. It feels like the machine is the King of this world, but it’s not the real King, and it won’t be the King forever. One day all of this will end. And in the meantime, we can ask the real King, we can ask God, for strength, for mercy, for rest, for answers. Just like how Jesus knew that the pain of dying on the cross was real, but eternal life was more real. But he still had to die first. Just like how the Israelites knew that Pharaoh’s power was real, but they saw that God’s power was more real. But they had to suffer as slaves first.

Knowing all this won’t make the pain and pressure go away. But we can keep it up knowing that the machine won’t win, knowing that God is in charge, and because of that, we don’t have to be bitter about all this. 

My Little Feather, things might get very hard. Pain and pressure are real. The machine is real. But it’s not as real as grace, not as real as mercy, not as real as the truth that you are made to be loved, you’re not a resource, you’re not fuel. The machine can push and threaten you all it wants. But it won’t have the final say.

Be brave, and be strong. Love the truth. And love those around you who don’t know it yet.