Love Moves Even When We Rest

After two sleepless nights — after the adrenaline finally released its grip — after I brought Tony home from the hospital late Saturday morning — my body did what it needed to do.

It stopped.

I spent the next few days mostly on the couch — napping, sore, tender — feeling the echo of fear move out of my muscles and bones. Anyone who has lived through a medical scare knows that strange in-between space: when the danger has passed, but the nervous system hasn’t quite caught up yet. When the body needs time to believe the good news.

And while I rested, something else kept moving.

Love.

Quietly.

Steadily.

Without urgency or demand.

In our small corner of the world, love moved in ways that felt unmistakable. A GoFundMe I helped organize for a local family facing eviction didn’t just reach its goal — it surpassed it. People I don’t know, and may never meet, gave what they could. Shares multiplied. Hands reached out without needing to be seen. The family now has not only rent covered, but a bit of breathing room beyond that. Relief softened a very real edge.

At the same time, more than a hundred people paused their own lives long enough to comment, to pray, to send love and well-wishes for Tony as he healed. Messages arrived while I slept. While I rested. While I did nothing at all to earn them.

That’s when the truth of something I’ve long felt became impossible to ignore:

Love does not require adrenaline.

It does not demand exhaustion, self-sacrifice, or proof of worthiness.

It doesn’t need us frantic or vigilant or performing.

Once it’s set in motion, it moves on its own.

Love moves like water down a riverbed.

It follows gravity, not force.

One act of care opens the way for another.

One yes creates room for the next. Giving flows naturally into receiving, and receiving — when allowed without shame — becomes giving again.

Fear contracts.

Love expands.

Lack is loud.

Abundance is often quiet.

The old stories tell us that rest is indulgent, that receiving is suspect, that we must strain and push and prove in order to deserve support. But what I watched unfold in those days told a very different story. When we allow ourselves to be held — by community, by grace, by one another — nothing collapses. In fact, everything softens. Everything works better.

I felt this truth in my body as clearly as I saw it in the world around me. As my muscles released, so did the need to control outcomes. As I rested, love continued its work without me managing it. The river didn’t stop because I stepped out of the way.

That’s the quiet miracle beneath so much of the noise we live inside.

Beneath the headlines, the fear cycles, the urgency, and the heaviness, there is an invisible current always moving us toward one another. It asks only that we stop resisting it. That we stop insisting on hardness when softness is what heals. That we trust connection more than control.

I don’t have a lesson here, and I’m not offering instruction. Just awe.

A deep gratitude for the way love shows up — in prayers from strangers, in shared resources, in unseen generosity, in the simple truth that none of us are meant to do this alone.

If you pause long enough, you can feel the river beneath your feet.

And once you do, you begin to trust that it knows exactly where it’s going.