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I'm home from Romania — from the town and the garden that made me. On Tuesday I told you most of that story. But there was one small thing I couldn't stop thinking about, too tender to rush past. So I saved it for us.

Let me tell you about a wall.

When I went back to the house I grew up in, I walked around to the outside walls — the ones tucked under the terrace, where the rain never quite reaches. And there, still on the wall, were drawings. Chalk drawings. The ones my sisters and I made as little girls, thirty-five years ago. Faded, but there. Kept all that time under the overhang, like little cave paintings, sheltered from every storm that had come and gone. I could hardly breathe.

And a verse rose up in me — Isaiah 49, words God speaks to people who were certain He had forgotten them:

"Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands."

His people had said the saddest thing a heart can say: the Lord has forgotten me. They were far from home. Years had gone by. And God answers not with a scold but with an image. He holds out His hands and says: I have engraved you here. Carved you in. You are not a passing thought I might lose track of — you are written into Me, where I see you every time I look down.

Friend, those chalk drawings were made by a little girl who had no idea she'd grow up, cross an ocean, and be gone for twenty-one years. She would have told you they were long gone — erased by time and weather and all the moves. But they weren't gone. They were being kept, waiting under the terrace for the day she came back to find them.

Some of you needed that today. Because you've wondered — quietly, maybe for a long time — if you've been forgotten. If the distance and the years and everything that's changed have somehow erased you.

You have not been erased. What you were sure time washed away, He has been keeping the whole time. You are not chalk that might one day fade. You are engraved on the palms of His hands. He cannot look at His own hands without seeing you.

So do one gentle thing today. Hold out your own hand. Look at your palm. And say the true thing back to God: I am engraved on Your hands. You have not forgotten me. Even here. Even now. Even this far from where I began.

You don't have to feel remembered to be remembered. The chalk didn't have to know it was being kept — it was kept anyway. Let yourself be one of the things God has quietly sheltered all this time, out of the weather, waiting for you.

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