Held in Unfailing Love

Resting in constant divine care.

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Resting did not come naturally to Nadia Khalil.

It was not that she was opposed to the idea in principle. She understood its value intellectually, the way she understood the value of many things she consistently failed to practice. She simply had a deep, long-established relationship with effort, and effort had always felt more trustworthy to her than anything she could receive without working for it.

She was forty-four, a Lebanese-Australian civil lawyer based in Sydney, the daughter of parents who had rebuilt their lives from the ground up after emigrating from Beirut in the early nineties, and who had given their children, among other things, an unspoken but thoroughly absorbed lesson: security is what you build, not what you are given. You do not wait to be held. You hold yourself. You hold others. You keep going.

It was, in many ways, a beautiful inheritance. It had produced in Nadia a tenacity and a compassion for vulnerable people that made her genuinely effective in her work and genuinely present to the people she loved.

It had also produced, in the quieter corners of her life, a woman who found it almost physically difficult to receive care without immediately looking for a way to reciprocate it, who apologised for needing things, who had developed the specific exhaustion of someone who has been holding everything for so long that they have forgotten what it feels like to put something down.

She had been a Christian for fourteen years. Her faith was real and had been tested in real ways. She prayed, she served, she gave generously of her time and her resources. But there was one dimension of her faith that had always remained slightly out of reach, not because she disbelieved it but because she could not quite feel it: the dimension of being loved without condition. Held without performance. Cared for not because of what she contributed but simply because of who she was.

She knew the theology. She had memorised the verses. But knowing a truth and inhabiting it are two different addresses, and she had been living near the first one for years without quite moving into the second.

The season that finally changed her address began with a diagnosis she had not expected.

It was not life-threatening. She wanted to be clear about that whenever she told the story, because she was uncomfortable with anything that might sound like dramatising. It was a chronic autoimmune condition, manageable but demanding, the kind that required her to stop treating her body as something she could push indefinitely without consequence. The specialist was direct and not unkind: significant and sustained rest was not optional. It was, from this point forward, a medical requirement.

For most people, the instruction to rest would have been welcome.

For Nadia, it was the most confronting thing anyone had said to her in years.

She sat in the specialist's office with the particular stillness of someone who is processing something that has just rearranged several things simultaneously, and she thought: I do not know how to do this.

Not the physical rest. She could learn the physical rest. She meant something larger. She meant the whole orientation of a life that had been built on doing and was now being asked, at a fairly fundamental level, to simply be.

Her husband, Karim, a quietly perceptive man who had loved her for seventeen years and understood her particular architecture better than anyone, said something that evening that she returned to many times afterward.

"You know," he said, sitting beside her on the sofa with his hand over hers, "you have spent our entire marriage taking care of everyone. Your clients, your parents, our children, me. I have never once seen you let someone take care of you without finding a way to minimise it."

She started to say something that would have been a gentle deflection and stopped herself.

"I am telling you this because God has been trying to tell you something for a long time," Karim continued, "and I think your body has finally just said it loudly enough that you cannot reframe it into something more manageable."

She looked at him.

"He loves you," Karim said simply. "Not the version of you that holds everything together. Just you. And I do not think you have ever really let that land."

She did not argue. She could not. Because what he was describing was true, and she had known it was true for years without knowing what to do about the knowing.

She had a conversation with her pastor, a warm and direct woman named Pastor Helen, the following week. Pastor Helen had walked alongside Nadia through several hard seasons and had the particular gift of speaking to the interior of a situation rather than just its surface.

Nadia described the diagnosis, the specialist's instruction, and the confrontation it had created with something she was only now naming clearly: her inability to receive love without earning it.

Pastor Helen listened with her full attention. Then she said: "Nadia, can I ask you something? When you read that God's love is unfailing: what do you actually hear in that word?"

Nadia thought about it carefully. "Consistent," she said. "Reliable."

"Yes," Pastor Helen said. "But unfailing means more than consistent. It means it cannot fail. Not that it does not fail. That it cannot. It is structurally incapable of failing. It does not have the capacity to run out or wear down or be withdrawn because you are too much or not enough or simply exhausted on a Tuesday. It is not a resource that depletes." She paused. "You have been treating God's love like something you have to maintain your eligibility for. And He has been loving you the entire time without any of those conditions attached."

Nadia drove home with that conversation sitting quietly and heavily in her chest.

She opened her Bible that evening to Psalm 136, a passage that repeats the phrase "his love endures forever" in every single verse, twenty-six times in succession, as if the repetition itself was making an argument: this is not an occasional love. This is not a conditional love. This is the kind of love that endures, that runs through everything, that is present in the ordinary moments and the difficult ones and the ones where you have nothing to offer except your exhausted, unimpressive self.

She read it slowly. All twenty-six verses. And by the end of it something in her, something that had been braced for a very long time, was beginning, very slightly, to un-brace.

She began her period of enforced rest with considerable resistance that gradually and unexpectedly became something she could only describe as sacred.

She reduced her caseload to what was sustainable rather than what was possible. She took the midday rest her specialist had prescribed, lying down in her own house in the middle of a working day, which felt at first like an almost unbearable admission of limitation and eventually, slowly, like a gift she had been refusing for years.

She prayed differently during those rest periods. Not the purposeful, structured, productive prayers of a woman with a list. Something quieter. Something that was less presenting and more receiving. She would lie in the afternoon quiet and simply tell God: I am here. I am tired. I am yours.

That last phrase, I am yours, was the one she kept coming back to. Not: I am useful to you. Not: I am serving you. I am yours. In the plain, unconditional sense of belonging that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with love.

It was unfamiliar and uncomfortable and, by degrees, the most restful thing she had ever experienced.

Her colleague and friend Yasmin, a warm Lebanese-Australian woman who had known Nadia since their law school days and had watched her operate at unsustainable speed for two decades with a mixture of admiration and concern, visited one Saturday afternoon and found Nadia sitting in her garden with a cup of tea and a book and an expression Yasmin said she had not seen on her face in years.

"You look different," Yasmin said, sitting down across from her.

"I feel different," Nadia said. "I have been resting."

Yasmin raised an eyebrow. "Resting or resting?"

"Actually resting," Nadia said. "Like: letting something hold me for a change instead of holding everything myself."

Yasmin looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone who has been waiting a long time to hear something said. "It suits you," she said finally.

Nadia laughed, which felt easy in a way it had not always felt easy.

She found Zephaniah 3:17 during one of her afternoon rest times, not by looking for it but by arriving at it in the course of her reading: "The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing."

He will rejoice over you with singing.

She read that three times.

Not: He will assess your performance and find it adequate. Not: He will acknowledge your contribution and continue to employ you in His purposes. Rejoice. With singing. The language of someone who is not merely tolerating your presence but is genuinely, extravagantly glad of it.

She had spent so much of her faith life trying to be adequate. Trying to contribute enough. Trying to be worth the love she was receiving. And God, apparently, had been singing over her the entire time.

She cried reading that verse, which surprised her, because she was not a woman who cried easily and had not cried in a while. But it was the right kind of crying: the kind that happens when something you needed to hear finally finds the part of you that most needed to hear it.

The autoimmune condition required ongoing management and always would. There were hard days and good days and days when the physical limitations reminded her, with more force than she preferred, that she was not the self-sufficient person she had always believed herself to be.

She was choosing to read that differently than she once would have.

She was not broken. She was being taught. Taught to receive. Taught to rest. Taught to inhabit the love that had always been present and had always been unfailing, even in the years she had been too busy performing to notice it was there.

Her daughter, sixteen-year-old Sara, sat with her in the garden one evening in the long summer light, both of them quiet and comfortable in the way that some evenings allow. Sara looked at her mother and said, with the particular directness of a teenager who has not yet learned to wrap her observations in politeness: "Mum. You seem happier than you used to be."

Nadia considered that.

"I think," she said, "I have been learning to let myself be loved properly."

Sara thought about that with the serious attention she brought to things that interested her. "That sounds like it should have been easy," she said.

"It was not," Nadia said. "But it is getting easier."

Sara nodded, satisfied, and went back to her book. And Nadia sat in the garden in the evening light of a life that had not resolved its difficulties but had found, underneath all of them, something that held.

Something constant. Something that had never, not once, in forty-four years of her imperfect and effortful and genuinely beloved life, failed.

She was done arguing with it. Done earning it. Done holding herself just outside its reach in the name of not being too much or not being enough.

She was held. She had always been held.

She was finally, at forty-four, willing to rest in that.

And it was better than anything she had ever managed to hold on her own.

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"The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing." Zephaniah 3:17

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