This reflection was born in grief, in a moment when tears changed the way I saw. What follows is simply a meditation on mercy, surrender, and the strange clarity that sometimes comes through loss.
Poetic Prelude
Before I knew how to pray,
I was held.
Before I could see,
I was bathed in color.
Before I understood mercy,
I was floating in it.
Before I knew how to love,
I was loved.
Even now,
when the sky glows blue
and the sea forgets how to roar,
I remember:
I was formed in the Womb of Light.
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Seeing from the Holy Angle
There are moments in Scripture when time seems to slow and vision opens—when prophets fall silent because what surrounds the throne is too radiant to name.
Not white alone, but refracted glory.
A rainbow encircling the throne.
Light bending into color around the presence of God.
Ezekiel saw it.
John saw it.
Not because they mastered vision, but because they were in the Spirit—in that place where striving ends, where light bends, and where even chaos is stilled enough to reflect.
They were seeing from what I can only call the holy angle—
that sacred posture where light meets tears,
and what once seemed invisible begins to glow.
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The Water in Their Eyes
Not long after my father passed away, I reached for the phone to call him and tell him about the beauty of the trees—and remembered, in that instant, that I could not. My eyes filled with tears, and as I looked again, the trees seemed almost three-dimensional.
And I remember thinking:
Tears do not only blur our sight.
They clarify it.
That moment stayed with me.
It made me wonder whether the prophets, too, saw from such a place—not merely from vision alone, but from faces lifted through tears toward glory, where light passing through water becomes something radiant and refracted.
Perhaps the rainbow around the throne is not only a vision of glory, but also a hint of posture: eyes wet, faces lifted, light meeting water in the act of seeing.
The prophets did not climb to see.
They bowed.
They trembled.
They wept.
And somehow the water in their eyes became part of the seeing.
Tears, far from being the enemy of vision, became its lens.
When the light of God’s glory meets the prism of our surrendered brokenness, color is born.
And perhaps that is part of what revelation is:
not mastery,
but yielded sight.
Not understanding first,
but being held long enough to see.
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The Sea That Forgot How to Roar
To ancient hearts, the sea was not restful.
It was threat.
Depth.
The unknown.
The place of chaos and creatures beyond control.
And yet in the visions of heaven, the sea is still.
Not gone.
Transformed.
A sea of glass, like crystal…
— Revelation 4:6
The chaos is not erased.
It is quieted.
It becomes a mirror, reflecting the One who sits enthroned above it.
Because glass only reflects clearly when it is still.
Perhaps the first mercy is not that God removes the deep,
but that He stills it enough for us to see His face upon it.
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Surrender and Mercy
There is a holy difference between submission and surrender.
Submission can be demanded.
Surrender can only be given.
The prophets did not merely kneel.
They fell.
They let go.
True revelation does not come by force. It comes when we release our grip—on control, on certainty, on performance—and fall into the hands of mercy.
And when Scripture speaks of that mercy, it speaks more tenderly than we often realize.
When God reveals His own heart in the Old Testament, He calls Himself compassionate.
The Hebrew word is raḥûm.
And beneath that word lies the root rechem—womb.
So when God speaks of compassion, He is not reaching for distance, but nearness. Not a detached kindness, but a love that encloses, sustains, and shelters from within.
He reveals Himself as Womb-love.
As mercy that forms before it is understood.
As tenderness that holds before it is named.
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The Womb of Light
And perhaps this is why it should not surprise us that when the time came for God to reveal Himself most fully, He came not first in thunder or fire, but in hiddenness.
In water.
In flesh.
In the womb of a woman.
The Word who was with God from all eternity entered the world through mercy.
Through enclosure.
Through surrender.
Through the secret place where life is formed in darkness before it is seen in light.
What had once been spoken in raḥûm was now made flesh in rechem.
The Compassion of God came to dwell among us by way of the womb.
And in that hidden place, mercy was not merely described.
It was embodied.
Light itself took on flesh.
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Becoming
So perhaps the invitation is simpler, and deeper, than we think.
Not to force revelation.
Not to rush becoming.
Not to fear the hidden places where God is still at work.
But to surrender.
To let the sea go still.
To let the tears become a lens.
To let the light bend.
To let mercy hold us again.
Because you are not being undone.
You are being remade.
In mercy.
In hiddenness.
In light.
In Him.
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Benediction
You do not have to be strong today.
You do not have to be wise.
You do not even have to understand what is happening.
You are in the Womb of Light.
The colors are still surrounding you.
The water is being stilled.
And the One who formed you
has never once forgotten you.
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If this week has stirred something in you—if you would like to walk further into these stories of presence, breath, and love that circles back—my memoir is waiting for you.
It began with a promise. It ends with everything I have shared this week, and much more.
I would be honored to have you read it.
It is the story of a father and daughter, and what love looks like when it comes full circle.
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© Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.
Thank you, my friend. So kind of you.