When Love Finally Found Me

By: Nathan Fletcher

It didn’t come when I was searching,

or when I thought I’d earned it through effort,

or when I prayed for rescue from what hurt.

Love found me after the storm had already passed…in the stillness aftermath…

when the wreckage of my own making

lay quiet and still around me.

I was emptied then…of ideas, of plans, of the need to fix.

I had run out of cleverness,

run out of the strength to wrestle life into the shape I wanted.

And in that emptiness, I was strangely free.

Not desperate. Not afraid.

Just open.

Uncertain, yes, but with a kind of soft wonder.

I had stopped asking to be saved,

because somewhere along the way I realized

I was never lost.

Everything I had been looking for

was quietly waiting inside me…there…

beneath the noise, beneath the wanting.

That’s when love found me.

Not as rescue.

Not as reward.

But as recognition…

the gentle reminder of what had always been there.

And I understood then:

Love does not come to those who reach for escape.

It comes to those who have touched the bottom,

made peace with their own silence,

...and are brave enough to remain open.