Still

I’m still here.

Still breathing the breath I did not create,
breath that moves through this old clay vessel
like wind through a canyon —
life-giving, powerful, and full of mystery.
I don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going,
only that it surrounds me and moves through me.

Still wondering why
the stars haven’t fallen,
why the world even keeps spinning,
why grace holds me gently,
through every wave of doubt.

Still asking questions.

Always asking.
The same aching questions
that echoed in my boyhood prayers —
Are You listening?
Do You see me?
Is all this stumbling still a kind of walking?

Still hungry to learn.

Not for answers, really —
answers get stale.
But for the fragrance of mystery,
like campfire smoke in autumn,
curling upward through the trees,
into something ancient,
something holy.

Still running in circles —

chasing my tail some days,
my shadow on others,
and my wife when she dances in the kitchen
like joy incarnate,
spinning the years into a song only I can hear.

Still in awe of beauty.

The curl of fern fronds.
The tremble of light through a dragonfly’s wings.
The sigh of an old psalm rising from a mossy stone.
I should’ve been one of those barefoot Céile Dé,
scratching scripture into driftwood,
singing the wind’s language to the sea.

Still staring off in the distance —

toward the hill, the cloud, the unseen hand.
Toward the promise I keep glimpsing
just past the edge of my knowing.
What the mystics call the thin place,
where heaven doesn’t knock —
it just seeps in.

Still noticing the little things:

a robin’s tilted head,
listening for the faint sound of a worm beneath the surface.
the sound of my wife’s toes cracking as she sneaks past,
not knowing I’m already smiling.
the smallest flowers pushing through the forest floor,
fragile and determined.
a tree frog tucked in the curl of a new banana leaf.
a hummingbird moving almost phantom-like
through the flower garden, here, then gone.
There’s something to be found,
if you sit long enough.

Still watching the horizon.

Not for signs, not for answers,
but because the old ones said:
Pay attention.
So I do —
to the wind,
to the ache,
to the flicker at the edge of things.
And maybe one day,
a whisper in the wind will say,
“You’ve done well to wait.”

Still pushing the limits —

of what this old frame can do,
of what love means when it hurts,
of what forgiveness looks like in the mirror.
Some days I get it right.
Most days, not quite.

Still listening.

For the voice that spoke it all into existence,
and still speaks in the crashing waves,
a gentle whisper,
and the laugh of a child.
I lean in like Samuel.
Here I am. Say it again.

Still singing whatever comes out.

Even off-key.
Even when the words aren’t mine.
Especially then.
There’s truth in unfiltered praise —
the kind polished theology can’t always reach.

Still amazed at how much I don’t know.

Still trying to understand
how love can be so patient,
how suffering shapes us without asking permission,
how the kingdom keeps arriving
without fanfare,
in cracked cups and shared loaves.

Still sitting.

Quietly.
Still.
Like a stone beside the sea,
like the Spirit moving over the deep.
Stillness isn’t inactivity —
it’s attention.

And so I sit.
I wait.
I stay.
I still.
Because even in the silence,
even in the ache,
even in the not-yet —
He is.

Part mystic, part shirtless & barefoot theologian, John Esling lives with one eye on the horizon and both feet in the dirt. Still learning. Still searching. Still.