Take a moment to steady your heart and slow your breathing. Whatever weight you may feel, you have permission to set it down right now. Come with me to a green pasture, near a stream flowing with crystal water. Hear the trickle of the stream and feel the cushion of grass beneath your feet, embracing you. Feel the strength of the earth beneath you. Its steadfastness. The safety within its stability. You are safe here. You can stay as long as you like. And when you're ready, come with me up this hill, so I can show you the view. Just a few more steps and you're at the top. Before you lies a vast landscape, with rolling hills. The stream joins a river before you, and you follow it to where it greets the horizon. It seems there is no end to your vision. You breathe in the clarity of this space. Everything makes sense, everything has a place, and all is at rest. Go ahead and take a seat, and look back into your past to find a moment that was just like this, and it seemed everything made sense. When all of life was in your favor. Perhaps sometime while you were a child at play. Or the first time you fell in love. Or visited another country. Remember this time, and try and understand how that time impacted you. How it molded you. What changed during that time? Now, let's descend the hill and enter the valley. Notice how the air becomes heavier, and it seems every action demands more effort. The perspective we had on the hill has been replaced with obscurity, and it's hard to see through the fog beyond a couple more feet. While in the pasture, you felt communion with the earth, the grass, the water. Down here, it feels cold. You feel cold. Have you been here before? A time when nothing makes sense? You don't really know where you're going, but the only way left is forward. Take a seat on a rock. Go ahead and take a seat, and revisit that season, and ask it what gift it had for you. What it taught you, when it silenced all the other voices, and you were left alone in your pain with your thoughts. Because the reality is both the hills and the valleys bring gifts.