I think about that word — loosed — every time I sit with JES.
Because here is a woman who was never bent over a day in her life. Five decades of marriage. Raised four children. Ran her own business. Modeled — walked into rooms and owned them. Look at her in these pictures — surrounded by daughters, grandbabies wrapped around her arms like they've always belonged there, laughing with her whole face. This is not a woman who was ever small.
And then dementia came in quiet, the way weeds come into a garden nobody was neglecting. Not because the ground was bad. The ground was rich. It just came anyway.
But here's what the enemy of memory doesn't understand about a praying woman: you can steal the names, but you can't steal what's rooted. A tree loses its leaves every winter — every single one — and nobody stands over it grieving, saying the tree is gone. We know something the tree's bare branches can't tell us: the root is still drinking. The sap is still rising somewhere we can't see.
Spring is not a hope. It's a certainty written into the wood.
That's JES. What looks like loss to the eye is, underneath, still root. Still rising. And I have watched — I have seen — the parts of her that don't need memory to work. She still reaches for the child in her lap. She still laughs from the belly. She still knows the shape of being loved, even on days she doesn't know the date.
So when I say “wellness and deliverance,” I'm not always talking about restoration back to what was. Sometimes deliverance looks like a woman who was bent by a name for a disease — set free, in this moment, in this hug, in this photo — to simply be loved, right where she is.
It shall come to pass. Even here. Even now. Lord!